This year, I’ve been able to pilot some of the new Pivot Interactives chemistry activities in my Chemistry Essentials course as part of their chemistry fellowship program. There is a much higher absence rate in Chemistry Essentials than in our other chemistry courses and one of the challenges I’ve been able to tackle with Pivot Interactives has been finding an approach for make-up labs that balances equity with a meaningful lab experience.
First, a little background on the course. My district offers four different chemistry courses, and Chemistry Essentials is designed to meet the minimum graduation requirements. Many of my students have seen limited success either in science in particular or in school in general and one of my challenges as a teacher is to make sure my students see my class as an opportunity to change the patterns they’ve experienced in other courses.
In my department, the standard approach when a student is absent from a lab has been to have them come in before or after school to complete it. The trick is many of the same issues that keep a student from coming to class, such as obligations outside of school or transportation issues, can also make it difficult for them to come in outside of the school day. Even if I’m willing to bend for a student who talks to me, how many never do because they see coming in outside of school as just one more immovable barrier they face? This is doubly frustrating to students who have a study hall or similar space in the school day where they could make up the lab, but the lack of available space or staff to monitor lab safety mean I can’t give students that opportunity.
My go-to has been to provide a make-up version of the lab with the data already filled in. While it gets away from requiring students to come in outside the school day, the data often feels like meaningless numbers when students don’t have any connection to how it was collected. Students also miss out on a lot of science practices, such as designing the experiment, using the necessary tools accurately, and the countless decisions that come with collecting your own data. While I think a student can make progress on these skills missing a lab here or there, a student who is gone frequently can easily miss out on a crucial part of the course.
Pivot Interactives has allowed me to give students something in-between these two approaches. While it can’t completely replace the kinesthetic experiences that happen in an apparatus-based lab, students still can make qualitative visual observations and develop a clear understanding of where the measurements come from since they are seeing the experiment and takin the data themselves. I can also easily write a make-up version of the lab that includes similar experimental design and data collection decisions that students had to make in the classroom. At the same time, students can complete the lab when and where it works for them, rather than having to make a small window of time work. As a result, many of this year’s make-up labs have felt more to students like an actual lab experience rather than a box to check using disembodied data.
Science is a Verb 