A foundational series on lab pedagogy and assessment.
Six essays in deliberate sequence. The first two establish the evidentiary foundation; the next three address specific arguments working coordinators encounter; the sixth synthesizes the rest into a single piece of advice. Posted as each clears the desk.
Foundation
What the bench teaches that the lecture cannot.
An inventory of the four kinds of learning that demonstrably happen at a lab bench and only at a lab bench — tactile-procedural memory, decision-under-uncertainty, the find-the-thing gap, and social calibration. Cited from the science-of-learning literature.
Why a 1,000-student gateway course has unusual obligations.
A reframing of the rigor debate as a duty-of-care debate. When a single course is the de facto admissions filter for nursing and medical careers across an entire region, its curriculum decisions warrant a higher evidentiary bar than ordinary courses.
Front-line
The competency I can certify after a practical — and the one I can’t after a multiple-choice exam.
A measurement-theory argument. Lab practicals and multiple-choice instruments measure different constructs; the right tool depends on what claim the assessment is meant to support.
Replacing bench work with paper exercises: a measurement problem.
What the transfer-of-learning literature says about substituting paper-based proxies for authentic laboratory tasks — and where the substitution is and isn't defensible.
Pedagogical innovation vs. content reduction: a distinction worth defending.
Some recent reforms increase comprehension while reducing lecture time (POGIL, peer instruction, team-based learning). Others reduce content under the same banner. The two are not the same thing, and conflating them is expensive.
A note on the writing here. These essays argue with positions, not with people. Where the evidence is contested, the contest is named honestly. Where I am uncertain, I say so. The aim is to be useful to a reader who hasn’t made up their mind yet.