Practical work is an essential component of teaching and learning in science subjects. The laboratory is a prominent feature of chemical and pharmaceutical tertiary educational programmes. The laboratory affords specific activities and learning outcomes, but we have limited knowledge of how students’ laboratory learning outcomes develop over time. To expand this knowledge, this thesis investigated how students’ laboratory learning outcomes can be characterised and how they develop over time. An interpretivist approach was used with “the Student Laboratory and the Science Curriculum” and the Congruence framework as essential theoretical assumptions. The characterisation of laboratory learning outcomes was done through a systematic review of the empirical literature and a discussion of these findings against previous reviews. The result was that students’ laboratory learning outcomes could be meaningfully grouped into five clusters: Experimental competences, disciplinary learning, higher-order thinking and epistemic learning, transversal competences and the affective domain. The importance of investigating actual empirically found outcomes was highlighted.
The longitudinal development was explored on a short timescale, through feedback for laboratory reports and on a long timescale, during the third year of the pharmaceutical bachelor’s degree programme at the University of Copenhagen. Data were collected by semistructured interviews with teachers and students and through analysis of official programme and course documents and students’ laboratory reports with teachers’ written feedback.
Qualitative thematic analysis was used as an analytical tool. Findings include that feedback can be a critical component of student learning and that progression of some of students’ laboratory learning outcomes is limited to a few critical experiences of independent problem-solving, most notably, the Bachelor’s projects. Helpful feedback formats and deliberate progression can develop students’ laboratory learning outcomes over time, but there is difficulty in planning and executing activities that leverage this power.