For most of us, those first few days of Chemistry class include a load of time spent prepping students for various aspect of
doing Chemistry. We spend a good deal of class time discussing lab procedures and equipment, lab safety and best practices, and measurement and associated topics like accuracy and precision and significant digits. Lab safety is of paramount importance to insure student safety and to reduce hazards and accidents. Additionally, we all know that there is a legal aspect to educating students about how to behave and act appropriately in the lab. Whether we like the role or not, we are the lab safety czar in the classroom and our failure to hold students accountable for following sound safety practices can result in more than injury; it can result in legal actions and loss of employment.
We believe that this Concept Builder can be part of your lab safety education and enforcement routines for your Chemistry classroom. The origins of the questions trace back to viewing about 3 hours worth of the most popular YouTube videos on safety in the Chemistry Lab AND to surveying a large collection of safety contracts available on the internet through simple Google searches. We made notes of what seemed to be the most commonly identified safety concerns and practices. We wrote our questions to reflect those commonalities. Our thought is that completion of the Concept Builder by a student would provide a more reliable signature of understanding than simply professing to have read and signed a Safety Contract. Signing a safety contract is important; but having an understanding of the items in the contract goes one step further ... both in terms of furthering actual student safety and in terms of having a legal record of emphasizing safety.
We recognize (or at least hope) that most teachers have a go-to method of educating their students on chemical safety. But in the event that there are those who are new to Chemistry teaching or even new to the profession, we would like to offer the following links to our favorite videos and safety contracts.
Videos:
Safety Contracts:
There are four activities that can be engaged in through the Concept Builder. Those four activities are differentiated as follows:
- Before You Start: Question Groups 1-5 ... Safety requires preparedness and forethought. Students must know the plan before you start. These questions target their preparedness.
- Chemistry Etiquette: Question Groups 6-9 ... Just about every safety contract includes information about food, drink, footwear, eyes, and hair. These questions will help students to review the policies on each.
- The Safest Way: Question Groups 10-14 ... As we know, there’s a right and wrong way to do certain things in lab; one leads to safety, the other to risk. Students will review the differences and choose safety.
- Now What?: Question Groups 15-18 ... Accidents will happen. Students identify the proper steps to take in order to reduce risk and enhance safety when accidents occur.
The questions from each group are shown on
a separate page. Teachers are encouraged to view the questions in order to judge which activities are most appropriate for their classes. We recommend doing the activities in the order in which they are presented as they are scaffolded in such a manner that one builds upon the other. We also recommend that teachers do each activity to gain a feel for the level of cognitive rigor required of the student.
Like all our Concept Builders, this Concept Builder utilizes a variety of strategies to make each student's experience different. The ordering of questions is random. The Question number assigned to each question is scrambled. For instance, two side-by-side students will not have the same question for question number three. And questions are organized into "groups" with questions within the same group being very similar (for instance, they target the same concept) but not identical. And finally, the answer options for Multiple Choice questions are always scrambled.
The Concept Builder also keeps track of student progress. It requires that students demonstrate a mastery of questions in each Question Group. In order to complete an activity, a student must correctly analyze each question of that activity. If a student's analysis is incorrect, then the student will have to correctly analyze two other questions in the Question Group in successive fashion in order to successfully complete the activity. This approach provides the student extra practice on questions for which they exhibited difficulty. As a student progresses through an activity, a system of stars and other indicators are used to indicate progress on the activity. Progress is displayed in the progress report on the right side of the Concept Builder. A star indicates a demonstration of mastery. A question with a red background indicates that the student has missed the question. And a question with a yellow background means that the student must get one more question from that Question Group correctly answered in order to obtain a star. When an activity is completed, the student will be awarded a Trophy. This Trophy is displayed on the Main Menu screen. These strategies make the Concept Builder an ideal addition to the 1:1 classroom and other settings in which computers are readily available.
The most valuable (and most overlooked) aspect of this Concept Builder is the Help Me! feature. Each question group is accompanied by a Help page that discusses the specifics of the question. This Help feature transforms the activity from a question-answering activity into a concept-building activity. The student who takes the time to use the Help pages can be transformed from a guesser to a learner and from an unsure student to a confident student. The "meat and potatoes" of the Help pages are in the sections titled "How to Think About This Situation:" Students need to be encouraged by teachers to use the Help Me! button and to read this section of the page. A student that takes time to reflect upon how they are answering the question and how an expert would think about the situation can transform their naivete into expertise.