In this study, a proposed conceptual framework for integrated learning in the laboratory1 is operationalised. The framework highlights the importance of looking at the laboratory as an educational premise that brings together learners in a complex but intellectually stimulating environment, in which conceptual and technical goals are set and learning activities are designed upon an underlying epistemic domain. Making a clear reference to the research tradition in the learning sciences and science studies, it views learners as agents who have to continually navigate between their cognitive system, their emotional states and traits, their motivation and volition, and the learning task at hand. Accordingly, they have to activate their mind and perform required technical skills at the same time. To make it more complex, it is also very likely that they have to work with peers on how to conduct the inquiry and presumably co-interpret the data that they will analyse individually. At this point, the social domain of learning plays its role and exerts its own bearing on the learning process. The epistemic domain constitutes the foundational domain that supposedly underpins all those endeavours. It encapsulates the kind of practice inherent in experimental work, where students typically generate their own data, propose some form of knowledge derived from those data, evaluate it, and to some extent, ‘legitimise’ the knowledge, i.e., the kind situated and contextualised in the experiment they have conducted. In the longstanding tradition of philosophical discourse, such process can be represented by ‘epistemic practice’2.

To operationalise the framework, a comprehensive assessment of student learning will be conducted to elicit richer accounts of various aspects of learning associated with the practice described above. This paper will present results from the first of three parts of the assessment, i.e. the one related to the social and epistemic domains. Students doing experimental work in the laboratory of pharmaceutical sciences are audio- and videorecorded. Their conversations, actions, and interactions are used as sources of data, together with focus group interviews based on selected segments from the recording.

A thick and detailed description of laboratory discourse will be generated from the data. Student learning is analysed from a holistic perspective, in which not only does their cognition matter, but also their conation, affect, coordination between mind and body, as well as their social-epistemological context. The study is unique in its potential implications for their epistemic agency3, especially in a current world where ways of understanding are contested in real time.

References
1. Agustian HY. Considering the hexad of learning domains in the laboratory to address the overlooked aspects of chemistry education and fragmentary approach to research on student learning. Chem Educ Res Pract.:1-27.
2. Kelly GJ, Licona P. Epistemic practices and science education. In: Matthews MR, ed. History, Philosophy and Science Teaching. Dordrecht: Springer International Publishing; 2018:139-165.
3. Elgin CZ. Epistemic agency. Theory Res Educ. 2013;11(2):135-152.