Williams takes us back 80 years to the first issue of JCE–to an article on Making High School Chemistry Worthwhile (a timeless topic) by C. E. Osborne (1). The main way that Osborne's philosophy differs from today's accepted practice is that he calls for students to work individually, rather than in collaborative teams. However, there is agreement that the laboratory experience is one of the most important requirements for connecting students' appreciation of chemistry with the world in which they reside.

In this issue Mohrig states that the majority of today's laboratories teach outdated techniques and continue to include traditional cookbook verifications that produce little meaningful learning. We want our students to participate in the process of science, but it appears that what is not being taught are the skills needed to extract knowledge from the experiments. It's easy to lecture, a little harder to deliver a commendable lecture, but even more challenging to develop academic experiments beyond the lowest levels of Bloom's taxonomy: knowledge and comprehension (2). One place where we can encourage our students to excel and go beyond basic knowledge is in the laboratory. It is through experimentation that the remainder of Bloom's categories (application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) can be used to improve our students' higher-order thinking skills so needed in today's world.

Meaningful Experiences in the Laboratory

• Demand that students come to lab prepared to think (Mohring); enhance opportunities for critical thinking (Hope, Jacob)
• Provide students with a theoretical background so that they can learn to draw conclusions to match the data collected (Mohring); stress a grounding in the scientific method involving observation, questioning, hypothesis formation, and testing (Mohring, Hessley, Persinger, Goodwin)
• Formal lectures have little place in the high school classroom (1); we need fewer and better lectures (Williams, Hessley), and we need to give students more opportunities to communicate whether among team members and/or in formal written notebooks (1)
• Give students well defined and precise questions to answer, but allow students the opportunity to develop their own protocols (Mohring)
• Have students work cooperatively in teams (Correia, Hope) with an approach geared towards interactive, guided inquiry leading to discovery learning (Mohring, Hessley, Goodwin)
• Use modern instrumentation (Mohring, Hessley, Persinger, Solow, Correia, Hope, Goodwin; (1)); note uses and limitations of the equipment and assure that students obtain proper training on good sampling/laboratory techniques (Sadik, Gondález)
• Make chemistry relevant and interesting (e.g., use case studies that engage students in awareness of societal needs) in hopes that constant review and questioning will make facts permanent (Tannenbaum, Persinger, Solow, Correia, Hope, Goodwin; (1))

Two major themes, which were stated by several authors, are to use the best and most up-to-date equipment available in order to teach the skills needed to succeed and to engage the students' emotional side so that connections between the real world and the laboratory experience will be meaningful. Whether you want to engage their curiosity with chocolate (see note 7 of Tannenbaum's article for a number of suitable labs for high school students) or the environment (Persinger, Solow, Correia, Hope, Goodwin; 3), it is up to you. What is crucial is that you don't forget about what is important to educating well prepared future teachers, industrial scientists, and government and community leaders (Goodwin). Will our problems ever be solved? Probably not, but that doesn't mean that we don't need to keep trying. There is hope that the laboratory experience will make abstract concepts more concrete (Goodwin) and meaningful.

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1. Osborne, C. E. J. Chem. Educ. 1924, 1, 104 - 109.
2. Bloom, B. "Bloom's Taxonomy" (accessed June 2004).
3. Kauffman, J. M. J. Chem. Educ. 2004, 81, 1229-1230.