I wanted to allow students to follow a more real life type of inquiry in chemistry labs that would allow them to experiment, make mistakes, revise their approach and retest. I would hope that this would allow them to build a deeper understanding of the concepts being covered as well as the idea of science inquiry itself. This is often difficult in chemistry classes due to time restraints, safety concerns, costs of materials, and the student’s lack of knowledge and experience regarding lab procedures.
Douglas Llewellyn’s workshop discussed the different types of inquiry from Demonstrated Inquiry all the way to Self-Directed Inquiry. I decided to adapt some common activities in SCH3U and hopefully move them from Structured Inquiry to Guided Inquiry. In most of the following activities I have provided the students with the goal or purpose of the activity but tried to leave it up to them how they would solve this – in other words – the procedure. In many cases, the procedure would seem ‘obvious’, but it is interesting to see how students react when they are not told exactly what to do.