MeasureNet Transforms Learning in California High School Chemistry Lab
Spectrum Quarterly July 18, 2005
Editor’s Note — The following are excerpts from a discussion with Elaine Preston of Palm Desert High School in Palm Desert, California. She currently serves as an Advanced Placement Chemistry Instructor and a District Grant Coordinator for Desert Sands School District. The school's Science Department offers the school's 2,000 students College Preparatory, Advanced Placement, and Honors Chemistry courses. Palm Desert High School is a public institution that serves an economically and culturally diverse community between Indio and Palm Springs California. It was named in April as a 2005 California Distinguished High School from some 2,300 eligible institutions. Only five percent of California’s secondary schools annually qualify.
SQ: What does technology need to do to be successful in the secondary school science classroom? Has MeasureNet met any of these requirements?
PRESTON: Technology needs to be transparent, reliable, and augment human capability. The best use of technology for education, in my opinion, does not involve anything which diverts from learning the subject. MeasureNet fulfills these specifications.
First, MeasureNet is extremely easy for students to learn. The menu-driven screens on the lab units communicate very well. Second, the system is stable, reliable, and the customer support is without parallel. Third, MeasureNet simply allows for greatly enhanced capacity in data collection. It expands what students understand and ... by collecting more data points, with a greater degree of sensitivity and accuracy. Students can appreciate that [MeasureNet] is doing the labor of investigation for them, and they can therefore concentrate on understanding and analysis.
SQ: From an instructor's viewpoint, what are you able to do now that your lab has been upgraded? Do you pedagogically approach modules/experiments differently? Did you earlier mention a titration lab that has been shortened by MeasureNet?
PRESTON: High school AP chemistry is really difficult to fit into a traditional six-period a day schedule. MeasureNet allows us to accomplish the 22 required labs in two hour blocks. In the past, without MeasureNet, I simply couldn’t finish complex labs, or labs, even if relatively simple, which required lengthy data collection in the two hours we had. And we had labs that sometimes “wouldn’t go away”— stretching into subsequent days of the week and wreaking havoc with my syllabus. The Determination of the pKa of a Weak Acid lab which I referred to was an example of this. This year, we finished in two hours and the students had “textbook” looking graphs to analyze.
SQ: Has Measurenet had any discernable impact on student learning or attitude?
PRESTON: Students love MeasureNet. They realize how it relieves them from the burden of tedious data collection. They realize that their percents of error are really low because of MeasureNet and they feel empowered. I hear them say “I wonder if the college I’m going to will have MeasureNet?” My Advanced Placement scores have gone up these past two years — I am now hitting passing rates in the low 70’s (the national average is about 57%, and about the same for overall AP exams at my school) with much larger classes than in the past. Certainly it isn’t all due to MeasureNet, but some certainly is!