The+Kitchen+is+Your+Laboratory

Review of “The Kitchen Is Your Laboratory: A Research-Based Term-Paper Assignment in a Science Writing Course”

Review of “The Kitchen Is Your Laboratory: A Research-Based Term-Paper Assignment in a Science Writing Course”

William C Schuster

October 2, 2011

Lehigh University

**Summary **

The article //The Kitchen Is Your Laboratory: A Research-Based Term-Paper Assignment in a Science Writing Course// (Jones, 2011) outlines a specific writing assignment designed to help students engage in all parts of the peer review journal writing process without the complexity of actual self-directed laboratory experimentation. The exercise is valuable to the student in many ways. It includes designing an original experiment using food as the subject and the home kitchen as the laboratory, conducting the research and adapting to any problems or variations that arise, and a full write up in the style and quality that is acceptable in a scientific peer review journal. The assignment is a large part of a college course that includes no real laboratory work but is focused on scientific writing. Many lessons are learned through this assignment and it ends up being generally fun for the students. The heuristic approach provides knowledge and experience that can’t be gained in regular classroom lecture setting and allows that student to be creative and design their own experiment.

**Analysis of Main Points **


 * 1) Students would be better prepared for graduate studies or careers as chemists if they fully understood and were comfortable with the peer review journal writing process, but it is not possible to include all undergraduate students in publishable laboratory experiments. Even more difficult to achieve would be to allow the student to design an original chemistry related hypothesis, carry out all experimentation, and do all the writing for submission to a peer review journal. Indeed, such extensive work is often a daunting, multi-year task for the experienced graduate student. This assignment makes it possible for the less experienced undergraduate student to participate in the entire writing aspect of the peer review process at the level he/she is at and only spend one semester doing it.
 * 2) The design of the assignment is described in detail. This is a long and complicated assignment and a good deal of in class time is dedicated to its completion (and undoubtedly more out of class time). The author presents how to teach the different parts of the assignment and gives examples of what students have come up with in the past. A grading rubric is also provided.
 * 3) Many valuable lessons can be learned beyond how to write peer review quality work, from the designing of one’s own hypothesis and the experiments to prove it, carrying out the work in a simulated laboratory, to the use of creative thinking needed to organize data and thoughts into a journal style paper and not simply plug information into a lab report template. This gets away from giving the student “canned” data and requiring him/her to write a report using something that they had no part in creating.
 * 4) The connection between the scientific process and the real world is an extremely valuable lesson for young chemists and all students alike, but it is a lesson that is not always learned through the normal laboratory experience, which can lack application to real –life. Lab experiments for undergraduate students and high school students often include mixing two chemicals not encountered in everyday life and making a product with no relevance to everyday application. This may be followed by measurement by instruments that the student has trouble seeing him/herself ever using again. By mixing the scientific process and an everyday activity like cooking, connections are made between class lessons, lab sessions, and life.
 * 5) Student feedback indicates that the project is enjoyable and that the intended lessons were learned. The author even includes a section in the paper titled “Student Evaluation”. This section contains many responses to the question that students were asked on the final exam: “What did you gain from the term paper assignment?” The responses indicate deeper understanding of the scientific writing process and connections that were made between writing in science and writing in English and history.

**Evaluation **

Through examples of student writings, by describing how the process played out, and by giving selected student responses, this article demonstrates that a carefully and creatively designed assignment can accomplish positive results without the constraints of the laboratory. In the introduction, the question is posed “…how do undergraduates typically learn to completely //do// science from beginning to end?” The author then outlines a way to do this through an assignment that does not require the student to be a seasoned chemist, or spend years researching.

The article is well written and thorough, backing up all claims with data and examples. It would not be difficult to follow this as a template in a class room setting. It does however require some prior knowledge from the student. By the time the assignment is initiated, the students have already researched some topics in the literature, read and analyzed some journals and held discussions on these topics. This project ties together the skills gained up to that point.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">On that note, this assignment would be above the scope of the average high school chemistry student. Indeed, the average high school chemistry student would not be likely interested in making a career that includes peer review journal writing. But there are still very valuable lessons for the average student demonstrated by this project. Most important is the use of critical thinking skills. This project could be adapted for the high school student in a number of ways. First, allowing students to work in groups would let them lighten the workload. Scheduling time in the family and consumer science kitchen would guarantee that the students would have access to standard equipment and could be supervised. Finally, relaxing the requirements of the language and format so it is not up to the quality of a peer review journal would make the writing within the student’s level. These changes would allow the pre-university student to exercise the creative writing and thinking process while seeing the connections between the scientific process and writing and real-life.

**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">References **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Jones, C. D. (2011). The kitchen is your laboratory: A research-based term-paper assignment in a science writing course. //Journal of Chemical Education.// Vol. <span class="citationvolume" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">88 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;"> (8), pp. 1062–1068. doi: 10.1021/ed1011184

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