403
Research on Science Laboratory
Activities: In Pursuit of Better
Questions and Answers to Improve
Learning
Kenneth Tobin
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Florida State University
Ta Hahassee, Florida 32306
For a great many years, laboratory activities have been regarded as an
important and almost sacred part of science education. By many science
educators, the laboratory is viewed as the essence of science, a philosophy that
often is enshrined in legislation and policy at state and district level. Yet the
evidence suggests that laboratory activities fall short on achieving the potential
for enhancing student learning with understanding (Hofstein & Lunetta, 1982;
Stake & Easley, 1978; Tobin & Gallagher, 1987). Laboratory activities promise
so much in terms of students being able to solve problems and construct
relevant science knowledge. Tamir and Lunetta (1981) indicated that the main
purpose of the laboratory in the science curricula of the 1960s was to promote
student inquiry and allow students to undertake investigations. They noted
that this emphasis was in marked contrast to using the laboratory primarily as
a place to illustrate, demonstrate, and verify known concepts and laws.
According to Hofstein and Lunetta (1982), laboratory activities can be
effective in promoting intellectual development, inquiry, and problem-solving
skills. Further, they claimed that laboratory activities could assist in the
development of observational and manipulative skills and in understanding
science concepts. But from all accounts, laboratory activities often are not
able to accomplish the desired outcomes. Novak (1988) described the problems
graphically:
The science laboratory has always been regarded as the place where
students should learn the process of doing science. But summaries of
research on the value of laboratory for learning science did not favor
laboratory over lecture-demonstration . . . and more recent studies also
show an appalling lack of effectiveness of laboratory instruction . . . Our
studies showed that most students in laboratories gained little insight
either regarding the key science concepts involved or toward the process
of knowledge construction.
Despite widespread acceptance of the importance of laboratory activities in
the science curriculum, research on teaching and learning in laboratory
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Volume 90 (5) May/June 1990
,404 Science Laboratory Activities
activities is not substantial. In the past 20 years, numerous reviews have been
equivocal on the purpose and effectiveness of laboratory activities in science.
Hofstein and Lunetta (1982) concluded their review with the suggestion that
the right questions probably have not been asked to focus research on
laboratory activities. That assertion is taken seriously in this review, and
efforts are made to identify a research agenda for science teachers and
researchers to pursue. The review draws on epistemology, research on learning
mathematics and science, and investigations of cooperative learning, as well as
key studies of science laboratory activities. The following sections of the paper
review and synthesize literature pertaining to teaching and learning with
understanding in laboratory activities.
Constructivism and Learning
Learning is defined as the construction of knowledge as sensory data are
given meaning in terms of prior knowledge. Learning always is an interpretive
process and always involves construction of knowledge. Von Glasersfeld
(1987, 1988) indicated that constructivism can be traced to the eighteenth
century and has been a persistent, though not dominant, epistemology since
that time. Von Glasersfeld (1988) stated:
Giambattista Vico [in 1710] . . . deliberately and explicitly renounced the
traditional contention that knowledge should reflect the world in an
"objective" ontological way and he declared that human reason could
(and should) contemplate and govern the world of human experience and
not the world as God might have made it. (p. 2)
Von Glasersfeld extended Vice’s ideas in a theory known as radical
constructivism. He explained the radical components of his epistemology in
the following way:
. . . knowledge cannot aim at truth’’ in the traditional sense but
(t
concerns the construction of paths of action and thinking that an
unfathomable ^reality" leaves open for us to tread. The test of
knowledge, therefore, is not whether or not it accurately matches the
world as it might be "in itself"a match which, as the skeptics have
reiterated, we could never check outbut whether or not if fits the
pursuit of our goals, which are always goals within the confines of our
own experiential world, (p. 2)
A common reaction of educators to constructivism is to claim "there is
nothing new in what is being suggested. We didn’t use the label, but we have
been following a constructivist approach since the 1960s." While this assertion
is undoubtedly correct in some cases, it certainly is not the case in many
projects and textbooks. Novak (1988) stated that:
It is now generally recognized that the major effort made in the 1950s
and 1960s to improve secondary school science education has fallen far
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, Science Laboratory Activities 405
short of expectations . . . Although many obstacles stood in the way of
revolutionary improvement of science education, at least one obstacle was
the obsolete episfemology that was behind the emphasis on "inquiry1*
oriented science . . . The view of science presented was more consonant
with . . . empiricist or posifivisf views than with more valid constructivist
views. Experiments were shown to be ways to "prove" or "falsify"
hypotheses rather than a method to construct new conceptual-theoretical
meanings, (pp. 79-80)
Constructivism implies that students require opportunities to experience
what they are to learn in a direct way and time to think and make sense of
what they are learning. Laboratory activities appeal as a way of allowing
students to learn with understanding and, at the same time, engage in a
process of constructing knowledge by doing science.
Problem Solving
Wheatley (1988) described problem-solving in constructivist terms as what is
done when it is not clear what needs to done to arrive at a solution. Thus, for
someone to have a problem to solve, they first need to be perplexed. The
salient feature of this definition of a problem is that teachers cannot prescribe
problems for learners. All that teachers can do is allocate tasks to be
completed; it is for learners to determine whether or not tasks become
problems. Von Glasersfeld (1988) also emphasized that students determine
whether or not tasks are perceived as problems. He stated:
problem situations themselves, given that they do not exist independently
in an objective environment, are seen, articulated, and approached
differently by different cognizing subjects, (p. 12)
If the tasks are well chosen, some learners from a class will undoubtedly be
perplexed by them and \\’\\\ set about to identify solutions. Equally surely,
other students will, for a variety of reasons, not find given tasks problematic.
These reasons include lack of motivation to learn, failure to construct the
intended meanings of words and characters used to describe tasks, and being
able to identify solutions almost immediately. In each of these instances,
specific students will not engage in problem-solving despite the intentions of
teachers and curriculum designers.
Problem-solving has appeal in science because learners are provided
experiences which approximate those of scientists engaged in constructing
knowledge of science. Problem-solving may or may not involve laboratory
activities. On the one extreme, students might solve problems by engaging in
thought experiments, while at the other extreme, equipment from the
laboratory might be involved. With little difficulty, however, laboratory
activities can be planned to emphasize problem solving. To what extent do
laboratory activities deal with problem-solving in the sense described by
Wheatley? Are students given tasks from which problems emerge? Do
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