Record: Daniel Hercules, Cameron Parrish & Daniel Whitehead, “Evaluating a College-Prep Laboratory Exercise for Teenaged Homeschool Students in a University Setting.” Journal of Chemical Education, 24, No. 3 (2016): 870-873. [Abstract]
Summary: Hercules, Parrish, and Whitehead from Clemson University organized a half-day laboratory exercise for a group of six 10th grade homeschooled students enrolled in an honors-level chemistry course organized by a Christian homeschool co-op. For all of the participants, the university program was their first ever experience in a real laboratory. In this article, the authors discuss how this program impacted the homeschooled students’ views toward chemistry.
The authors recognize that one of the limitations of homeschooling is that it is difficult to design and execute laboratory exercises that can be feasibly and safely conducted at home. Therefore, homeschooled students frequently miss out on the opportunity of performing experiments in a laboratory setting. To correct this, they created the Clemson Chemistry Connection for Homeschoolers (C3H) program, which was geared toward providing homeschoolers with access to laboratory exercises in a university setting. Although the researchers knew that their six participants from rural South Carolina were homeschooled for religious reasons, no effort was made to incorporate religious doctrine into the program.
The outreach program consisted of a half-hour lecture period followed by a 2.5 hour experiment in a university laboratory. The experiment required students to deduce the identity of an unknown inorganic salt and its chemical composition through a series of laboratory experiments. Emphasis was also placed on laboratory safety and common lab procedures like Bunsen burner use.
All six participants were able to successfully complete the experiment. Anecdotal evidence from the participants was uniformly positive. A brief survey that was given to the students before and after the program found that the students felt more comfortable with chemicals, laboratory skills, and their ability to follow experimental protocol after completing the program. They also felt more prepared for a college laboratory course and less apprehensive about conducting a laboratory exercise. All of the students, both before and after the program, acknowledged that laboratory exercises are a very important part of learning chemistry.
Appraisal: The present article fits nicely with this article that we recently reviewed by David Wachob about a university-based physical education program. Although chemistry and physical education are very different subjects, both articles describe universities that have reached out to homeschooled students. As Wachob demonstrated in his program, homeschooled students are ideal candidates for teacher education programs who would like to give their student teachers more hands-on experience while remaining under the guidance of university faculty. While the authors of this article do not make their program more multi-dimensional by including student teachers, it would be easy to imagine a similar program where pre-service chemistry teachers could guide homeschooled students to complete simple experiments while remaining under the watchful eye of chemistry faculty.
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