LABORATORY WORK

What?
- Most of us will say is experiment
- It engages students in finding out & learning through experiences
- It can be used to promote the learning outcomes like attitudes toward science, scientific attitude, scientific inquiry, conceptual development, and technical skills

Approaches to laboratory work:

1. Science process skill
- the inquiry skills engage in investigation are observing and inferring, measuring, hypothesizing, communicating, and experimenting

2. Deductive or verification
- General to specific
- To confirm concepts, principles, and laws that have been delivered during classroom discussion and reading
- Help to reinforce subject matter content in the class

3. Inductive
- Opposite of deductive
- Specific to general
- To develop concepts, principles, and laws through firsthand experiences before the idea is discussed in the class

4. Technical skill
- Essential for conducts successful laboratory activities and obtain accurate data
- Manipulative skills: development of hand-eye coordination such as focusing a microscope, sketching specimens, measuring angles, and cutting glass
- Knowing the experimental techniques well and orderliness
- psychomotor & mental practice are beneficial in improving accuracy & precision of students’ laboratory measurements

5. Problem solving
- Students are given the opportunities to identify problem, design procedures, collecting information, organize data, and report the findings
- Involve authentic inquiry experiences for students

Teaching / Instruction

Teaching: Activities of educating or instructing; activities that impart knowledge or skill and guiding the students. It is a two ways interaction between teacher and student or student and student.

Teaching approaches:

1. Inquiry discovery approach
- Spectrum / continuum; from structured à guided à open
- characterized by interactive, student-centered activities
- can be carry out through questioning, exploring, discussion & problem solving

2. Contructivism
- students generate their own knowledge/idea based on their prior knowledge and experiences
- giving students the opportunity to discuss, share and express their opinion or idea

3. Contextual learning
- students/learners process the new knowledge and understand or make sense on it in their own way or manner
- prior knowledge and experiences are essential
- relate the teaching to their experiences and daily life

4. Science, technology and society
- Relate to students’ daily experiences
- Investigate issues / problems through discussion

5. Mastery learning
- An approach in teaching & learning whereby focus on students’ ability to master certain concept or idea
-Depends on time for students to master and quality of teaching & learning
-Success in mastery learning depends on persistence, chance for learning, rate of learning, quality of teaching, and ability to understand
- Teacher must plan properly in managing the activities

Thinking Skills

Thinking – a mental process to integrate knowledge, skills & attitude for understanding of

environment.

Thinking skills can be categorized into critical thinking skills & creative thinking skills. A person who thinks critically always evaluates ideas in systematic manner before accepting. A person who thinks creatively has high level of imagination, able to generate innovative & new ideas, and modify ideas and products.

There was also thinking strategies. Thinking strategies are higher order thinking processes that involve various steps and each step involves various critical & creative thinking skills.

Science process skills and thinking skills are interrelated. Science process skills are skills that are required in the process of finding solutions to a problem or making decisions in a systematic manner. It is a mental process that promotes critical, creative, analytical and systematic thinking. Mastering of science process skills and the possession of suitable attitudes and knowledge enable students to think effectively.

Scientific attitudes & Noble values:

There is a need in inculcating the students the scientific attitudes and noble values. The values and attitudes that learn can be used wherever they are. Some of the attitudes and values are:

• Having critical and analytical thinking
• Being flexible & open minded
• Being objective
• Being systematic
• Being cooperative
• Being fair and just
• Dare to try
• Being confident and independent
• Thinking rationally