Wendy Sherman Heckler Otterbein College Dept of Science Education 3 Dec 2007 Title: School Science Labs as Demonstration/Experiment Hybrids Abstract: When laboratory activities are assigned as part of (K-16) science courses, students routinely find themselves positioned in two competing ways: on the one hand, they are often asked to complete the activity as a naive observer would, making careful, unbiased observations and drawing inferences and conclusions from data. On the other hand, students are well aware that the conclusions they reach should reflect known scientific principles; there are always, to some degree, "right answers" to be found. Science education researchers typically have addressed this tension by attempting to strike a curricular balance between "cookbook" and "discovery" labs in order to produce optimal conceptual learning. I want to ask the science education research community to consider an alternative conversation. Rather than see laboratory activities as a means to an end (conceptual understanding), I propose asking what students do learn in labs that might be considered worthy knowledge in its own right. In taking on the competing positions described above, students acquire some sophisticated abilities that are related to the scientific practices of experimentation and demonstration. Moreover, these abilities are related to conceptual understanding, though perhaps in unexpected ways. My presentation describes this alternative view of laboratory activities, using examples from the literature and from studies of students completing classroom lab exercises across the K-16 spectrum.