Teaching Innovation Projects Final Project Report Form 2012/13

Outcomes and impacts: Safety Teams In the second semester we have introduced student-lead safety teams to our first year undergraduate laboratory in order to improve student awareness of safety issues. Each laboratory session was allocated two safety teams of 2 or 3 students who were responsible for assessing laboratory safety using an iPad-compatible checklist. We elected to use iPads over the traditional clipboard and pen as it was anticipated that the novelty of such a device would increase student engagement. Students were required to record their observation using the checklists, but were also encouraged to either challenge their peers or alert a member of staff if they believed that they were contravening safety regulations. It was hoped that by being part of a safety team students would adopt a more hands-on approach to safety, something that may prove invaluable both later in their degree course when carrying out final year research projects and also if they chose to pursue a career in practical chemistry. Being part of a safety team generally produced two reactions from students: they took pride in having the additional responsibility and were very diligent when completing the laboratory checklist, or they viewed it as yet another task that they had to complete during the laboratory session and wanted to complete it as quickly as possible. Generally the majority of students took being part of safety team seriously and a number engaged with laboratory staff to ensure that they were identify safety issues. Currently it isn’t possible to accurately assess the impact of safety teams in our laboratory. We must examine the behaviour of this cohort in future semesters to gauge whether the introduction of safety teams has impacted on safety awareness in our laboratories. In addition to the intended purpose of the safety teams, the completion of laboratory checklists may also serve to highlight common safety issues in our first year undergraduate laboratory. In the past members of staff have only had anecdotal evidence to identify key safety issues in the laboratory. It has become apparent that students are generally compliant with safety rules , that they may be familiar with from school, such as wearing safety glasses and not eating in the lab. However the safety checklists did highlight a number of causes for concern, such as the amount of students touching their face during a lab session, and the general lack of cleanliness and tidiness in the lab.

Learning and Professional Development Centre. July 2013

Safety Quiz An extended laboratory safety briefing was conducted with the new first years in week 2 of semester 1, 2012/13. This was more interactive and included a demonstration on the incompatibilities of certain chemicals when set alight and mixed. Afterwards, and as part of the module assessment for CHE-10047, students were required to sit and pass a safety quiz through the KLE. Students were given three attempts at the quiz, and there was a minimum pass mark that had to be achieved (23/25 on one attempt, or a minimum of 18/25 on each of 3 attempts). This was achieved by most students with varying degrees of success and revealed key misconceptions: 

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Students struggle to decide how to dispose of chemical waste because they cannot classify compounds as inorganic or organic. (This is a bit of a revelation to us because this distinction is fundamental to many teaching concepts!) Students are still generally confused about appropriate use of disposable gloves in the laboratory. (Equally revealing was the fact that staff are too.) There is still a fundamental disconnect between how students perceive chemical risk and how they act in the laboratory. For example, wear gloves because chemicals like X may cause burns - clearly understood in answers to safety quiz. Wipe face with gloved hands after handling chemicals like X – picked out by safety teams.

Attitudes towards Chemistry Questionnaire This is still in the development stage and will use misconceptions identified in the above two activities to get a better sense of why students have these seemingly conflicting ideas towards chemicals.

Further achievements: We have more questions than answers about how students behave with respect to laboratory safety. We do have the beginnings of better understanding of when and where new interventions should be planned from a pedagogical standpoint.

Evaluation:  

Students were very keen and eager to do the safety teams (the iPads definitely helped), but reluctant to point out things to classmates that were wrong or potentially harmful. As we were extensively evaluating the whole of our new first year, we omitted to evaluate the safety teams and safety quiz effectively (the cohort were a little tired of requests for feedback). We will evaluate this next academic year from the student perspective and would be happy to provide details if required.

Dissemination and outputs, including materials developed:  

First Year Laboratory Safety Checklist developed (Google Docs/Drive form). Extensive laboratory safety quiz developed (Excel and Respondus format suitable for easy modification and upload to most course management software).

Learning and Professional Development Centre. July 2013

Dissemination: Poster at Higher Education Academy STEM Conference, April 2013 Poster at Keele University’s Teaching Day, July 2013 ‘Oral Bite’ presentation at Variety in Chemistry Education Conference, August 2013 (to seek collaborators for attitudes towards chemistry questionnaire)

Future work: Safety Teams Students might be less passive in their approach to safety teams if we assess their contribution to safety teams as part of a module mark. In addition more emphasis needs to be placed on their responsibility in ensuring the laboratory is left in a clean (and therefore safe) state at the end of practical sessions. Adding an assessed component would also ensure that this would be taken more seriously. It may also be possible to introduce the safety teams at the beginning of the academic year rather than during semester 2 so that students see safety teams as integral parts of lab sessions. Given cognitive load in lab sessions in the first semester is substantial given that many will have little lab experience it may be necessary to use postgraduate demonstrators to lead the safety teams such that students become familiar with the process without adding too much responsibility to an already challenging experience. Safety Quiz To be updated before 2013/14 academic year to address issues surrounding misunderstanding the question. To add in question sets relating to safety issues discovered by the safety teams in 2012/13 academic year. Attitudes towards Chemistry Questionnaire Questionnaire in draft stage, ethics to be submitted. Collaborators sought to look at wider student cohort than just Keele Chemistry students. Results of safety teams and safety quiz providing much inspiration for specific questions to be asked. Long Term Impact Evaluation The attitudes towards safety of the 2012/13 student cohort will continue to be evaluated as they progress through their degrees. While this is outside of the timescale of this reporting period, it was anticipated at the time of application that this project would yield results on a longer timescale.

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Learning and Professional Development Centre. July 2013