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C/- The School of Chemistry
The University of Sydney
NSW 2006, Australia

P: +61 2 9036 9151
F: +61 2 9351 3329

Report

The most recent ACELL workshop was run at the University of Sydney, on February 13 to 15, 2006.  It was attended by 33 staff delegates and 31 student delegates from 27 universities around Australia and New Zealand, as well as by the ACELL team.  Over the course of the three days, the delegates tested 33 experiments; these experiments are identified in the document at the bottom of this page.

The workshop itself was an enormous success.  Both staff and students commented positively on the potential for the ACELL process to improve student learning in laboratories, on the way in which their knowledge of educational issues had increased, and that their participation in the workshop had been valuable (Figure 1).  Students came away from the workshop convinced that designing laboratory exercises involves more than they had realised, a sentiment with which more than half of the staff agreed.

Figure 1

Student delegates to the workshop came away having realised that academic staff are more interested in improving laboratory learning than they had previously realised (Figure 2); comments to this effect were common in the survey conducted at the end of the workshop.  Students also learned that laboratory exercises are intended to teach more than they had previously realised.

Figure 2

Staff also learnt from their experiences at the workshop, with nearly 90 % agreeing that their workshop participation had reminded them of what it was like to be a student (Figure 3).  This might also be reflected in the number of staff commenting in surveys on how tiring they found the workshop process.

Figure 3

 The Educational Template developed by ACELL was also generally well received (Figure 4), although staff indicated a greater willingness to use it when writing new experiments than when evaluating existing experiments.

 Figure 4

A more extensive set of workshop evaluation data, including the qualitative data from the open-response survey items, is available below.  A detailed discussion of how to analyse such qualitative data, using this set of data as a model, is provided here.

Related Documents

  • Delegate Evaulation of the 2006 Workshop (Acrobat PDF 35kb)

    This file contains a summary of the responses of the delegates to the 2006 workshop to the Likert scale items on the evaluation survey, and the verbatim responses to the open-ended items.

  • Experiments at the 2006 Workshop (Acrobat PDF 26kb)

    This document lists the 33 experiments tested at the 2006 workshop, along with their identification codes.