Hot Take: Your Pre-lab Activities Aren’t Working but 1,600 Students Told Us What Will

Written by Victoria Guzzo • October 29, 2024 •  4 min read
Hot Take: Your Pre-lab Activities Aren’t Working but 1,600 Students Told Us What Will Featured Image

Don’t kill the messenger, but someone’s gotta tell you…Your traditional, written pre-lab activities—meant to better prepare students for your on-campus, hands-on lab—just aren’t working. 

Well intended, yes. Effective, no. 

With the rise of online, hybrid, and blended learning, courses that take advantage of the latest technology and digital tools can end up being the most effective. Similarly, your on-campus students can benefit from many of the same tools, and in the process, you can improve the quality and effectiveness of your course and the student learning experience.

Enter Virtual pre-labs. 

The Purpose of Pre-labs

Pre-lab assignments are tasks or homework that students complete before arriving in class for the lab. Pre-lab assignments are supposed to prepare students for that experience, motivate them, and help them connect conceptual understanding with an experiment. Most pre-labs involve:

  • Helping students understand the models, theories, and principles addressed in the lab procedure — giving them a conceptual framework for the lab
  • Ensuring that students know how the lab fits into the course content
  • Outlining the lab procedure and data analysis
  • Orienting students to the relevant equipment and safety procedures

But many pre-lab assignments seem to miss the mark when it comes to actually preparing students to step into your lab to perform a hands-on experiment, and the reason is apparent.

A Disconnect between Preparedness & Traditional Pre-Labs

In the summer of 2024, we surveyed 1,878 students taking online and on-campus lab courses. We asked them what their biggest challenge was. 

You know what they said?

50% didn’t feel confident in their abilities

39% didn’t feel prepared

34% struggled to complete labs in the allocated time

Then we asked nearly 300 educators what their biggest challenge was. You know what they said?

80% said that students lack preparedness and pre-requisite knowledge.

Still, more than two-thirds of instructors said they use pre-labs to better prepare students, which most often include written assignments from a lab manual. And while most instructors perceived these assignments as effective, they still find their biggest challenge to be a lack of student preparation. 

Some instructors attribute changes in student preparedness to the learning gap created by COVID-19. As one tenured faculty member said, “Student preparedness is the biggest challenge I face in the classroom. Students are taking twice as long to complete a lab than pre-COVID students, but the labs are the same. Students are less prepared when they come to class. They come into a lab setting having no idea what they will be doing.”

So despite their widespread use and perceived effectiveness, written pre-lab assignments can’t bridge this learning gap and don’t stand up to the top challenge cited by administrators, instructors, and students alike: a lack of student confidence & preparation for on-campus labs.

A Better Way to Bridge the Confidence & Preparation Gap

For students, nothing feels more pointless than going through the motions of learning about a lab and READING what it’s like to do it without understanding why it is significant, how it works, or what it all looks like. What is important is to use an approach that emphasizes to students that experimental science is the basis for the models they learn about in lecture. Lab, unlike lecture, represents professional science in practice. Lab also represents a playground where curiosity is sparked and scientific theories are put to the test. If students recognize this, they will gain a better understanding of what science truly is and be more motivated in their lab work.

A well-designed pre-lab also takes students’ out-of-class time constraints into account. More than 40% of students said they spend under 1 hour preparing for a lab, making the quality and content of your pre-lab especially critical. Focus your efforts on leveraging high-quality learning activities so that you make the most of that one hour and better prepare students for an enriching hands-on learning experience.

Using Virtual Pre-labs with Trial Experiments

Most pre-lab activities stop at theory, safety, and procedures, which leaves students unsure of how this guidance applies to the hands-on experiment and serves as a missed opportunity to more deeply engage students in the practice of science. 

But when you take the preparation a step further and incorporate virtual pre-labs with simulated experiments, you give students a chance to see how the lessons on theory, technique, and safety apply to the experiment. They’re more likely to connect the concepts you’re teaching to the real world, and you’ll be able to maximize your in-person lab time and help students gain a deeper mastery of the concepts you’re teaching.

In fact, virtual pre-labs that include simulated trial experiments can:

  • Train students in conducting experiments and addressing problems
  • Save valuable lab time by introducing techniques, equipment/materials & safety protocols
  • Reinforce theoretical concepts
  • Make students feel better prepared and more confident going into experiments

In a 2022 study on the effects of pre-laboratory activities, researchers found that pre-labs were an effective teaching strategy that promoted students’ behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement in the course. The study also concluded that pre-labs positively influenced student attendance for in-person labs, worked to promote a sense of belonging, supported diverse student learning styles, improved students’ confidence and motivation, and encouraged self-directed, deep learning. 

Further, in survey data collected for the 2024 Annual Lab Report, the majority of students said the type of pre-lab activity would make a difference. In fact, 83% of students (1,600) said that a virtual pre-lab that included a review of lab procedures, summary of safety protocols as well as a simulation of a trial experiment would help them feel more prepared for an in-person lab.

Source: The 2024 Annual Lab Report

With pre-labs that include virtual simulations of the hands-on experiment, students can see why certain concepts are significant. They have an opportunity to repeat experiments in a low-stakes environment, move at their own pace, and more deeply engage with course material. 

As one student shared, “The virtual simulations gave us a chance to do experiments over and over again, until they were clearly understood. That was a great advantage.”

The result? Even with limited preparation time, students can improve their confidence and feel more prepared, which directly impacts their performance. Studies have shown that learners with higher confidence are more willing to learn, challenge themselves, and have better resilience in the face of difficult challenges. Confidence is also a big factor in keeping learners engaged. By increasing confidence, you’re allowing the learner to believe they have the potential to achieve and reduce their fear of failing. 

“Because of the limited time in the lab room, some of our procedures are so simplified that students don’t get to observe both positive and negative controls, or make a labeling mistake that invalidates their data, and we don’t have time to repeat a trial/sample. For me, the limited time in the lab room is the biggest hurdle both in terms of teaching appropriate technique as well as collecting enough data for a well-supported conclusion in the lab report,” shared one chemistry instructor.

In addition to building their confidence, students can explore unfamiliar concepts at their own pace and practice course correcting problems and repeating the simulation as many times as needed—all before walking into the campus laboratory—giving you the chance to spend more time on analysis and discussion with students. Students will feel more prepared and confident in their abilities when they enter your lab, having gone through a virtual simulation of the lab and seen safety measures and lab techniques in action—extremely valuable for non-majors or for those students taking a lab for the first time. 

Example of Putting Theory into Action: Microscopy Virtual Pre-lab
Many lab courses require students to use microscopes. Before they can do that, they need to learn the basics of the microscope, including knowing how to focus a microscope, how to put a slide on the stage, and how to find a sample on the slide. Using a microscopy virtual pre-lab, students can walk through how to handle and operate a microscope, using a v-scope of virtual scope. These lessons prepare students to go into a physical lab and use a real microscope following the same procedures and protocols.

Today’s Pre-Labs Need to Do More

Despite learning gaps and the clear lack of student preparedness, some instructors still remain resistant to these interventions or feel limited to departmental constraints. As one chemistry instructor shared as part of the 2024 Annual Report, “I don’t use pre-labs because I am the junior-most faculty member and the others don’t. I try hard to assign a similar amount of work and to have assessments of similar difficulty. I would strongly prefer to utilize pre-labs but have decided it is a higher priority to remain in step with the others teaching the same classes.” 

Others remain frozen in inaction, as one chemistry instructor said. “I’ve become an out-of-date teacher unable to adapt.”

As the lines between online and face-to-face learning continue to blur, instructors have an opportunity to deploy more online learning tools that can improve student preparedness and the in-person learning experience. Using virtual pre-labs with trial experiments allows you to spend more of your face-to-face time with students going deeper into practical application and engaging in more meaningful interactions, which can work to support better outcomes and greater student success.