Is it Possible to Evaluate the Learning Process of Students in Chemistry Laboratory Courses?

For many decades, laboratory courses have been an integral and central part in any curriculum of students learning for science or engineering degrees. During the years, laboratory courses` goals have changed dramatically and sophisticated and advanced experiments were introduced. However, it is still difficult to evaluate the performance of students in laboratory courses and to get an insight on the learning curve of the practical work aspect. It is well known that laboratory courses require a major effort on behalf of the students. The main reason for that is the combination of several understanding levels and skills which are needed and graded. The final grade in a laboratory course can be roughly divided into: preparation, performance and reporting. The student` preparation and reporting parts can be easily evaluated by regular methods. However, the assessment of the students` experimental work, which is an essential part of the final grade and the monitoring of the experimental work learning curve, is very difficult to achieve.

In order to deal with this problem we have developed in the past years, rubric scores both for students and teaching assistants (TAs), which are based on chosen parameters. From the TAs point of view, the rubric score enables a systematic and standardized grading of the performance of students in Chemistry` laboratory courses. From the students` point of view, it helps non verbal understanding of the skills which are expected to be developed during the course. Comparison of the two rubrics scores enables to give formative assessment in real time along with improvement of the student/TA interface and some insight on the learning process of the students.