In Search of Inquiry: Creating an Inquiry Based CHM-101 Laboratory Assignment to Improve Student Engagement

Our main goal was to replace one of our Chemistry 101 laboratory assignments with an inquiry based assignment. Most CHM-101 laboratory assignments are created in a 'cookbook style', where students are given step by step directions to follow. Our goal was to replace an existing CHM-101 lab with an inquiry-based activity, where students are given the necessary background information and a flexible procedure, then they come up with the results and conclusions on their own. Inquiry-based assignments are more valuable because they lead to a greater final understanding of the main concepts and skills. To accomplish this goal our team went to a conference at St. Mary's college where we were taught by a knowledgeable Chemistry Lab Curriculum (CLC) team the importance of sense of belonging in our educational spaces for our students. We then learned how to use backwards design to design our new laboratory assignment. The lab experience that we created is a spectrophotometric detection of thiocyanate, a smoking biomarker. Thiocyanate is a colorless analyte, so students must react the analyte with iron(III) to form a colored complex. They then measure the absorbance at one concentration, and the entire class's data is compiled to form a Beer's law plot. Within this activity, students practice dilutions using common laboratory glassware. The difference in glassware accuracy is visualized through R2 values of the Beer's Law plots. This specific laboratory assignment was chosen because solution preparation and concentration calculations are essential skills in CHM-101.Through this lab the students gain an understanding of conceptual topics including units of concentration, proper measurement technique, and Beer's Law; They will also leave our laboratory assignment knowing the limitations of common glassware, with pipetting experience, the ability to express concentration in molarity, and an understanding of the relationship between absorbance and concentration.The final results obtained by the students were promising. Student data showed that the most accurate preparation technique involves volumetric glassware, while beakers yield the least accuracy. Overall our new assignment ran well and was enjoyed. Students left the new assignment with greater knowledge and we are assessing the pre- and post-experience surveys to determine the extent that students improved their understanding of the target learning objectives.