Mind the Gap! Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice in Laboratory Assignments

Typically, students who arrive at the laboratory classes are expected to possess the knowledge necessary to ensure safe and fruitful work. Sometimes, however, the knowledge obtained from attending the lectures and from reading course books does not quite fulfill these expectations. In this paper we have looked at what we call the "gap problem", i.e., the situation where the information, the understanding and the skills that students really fathom are not what is needed for performing the laboratory assignments. It is important to note that "the gap" is a very subjective and somewhat fuzzy term, experienced rather differently by different people. We have done a preliminary analysis of the current situation, using a simple questionnaire to estimate how common the problem actually is, but also to discover how it is perceived by all the involved parties. We have separately interviewed students, teaching assistants and lecturers from the Department of Chemistry at Lund University. In our opinion, it is a shared responsibility of these three groups of people to make laboratory classes and lectures fit smoothly – if any of them do not fulfill their obligations, problems are bound to occur. Despite the preliminary format of the survey and the limited number of people we have interviewed, some intriguing and rather unexpected trends can be observed in the data we have obtained. The most interesting result, in our opinion, is that all three parties have admitted that they are aware that the gap exists. However, many of them do not perceive it to be a problem, although the percentage differs significantly between the three groups, with teaching assistants being most likely to perceive the situation as problematic.