Why 300h of labs needs to shrink

I have come to believe that the RSC’s accreditation demand for lab hours is damaging the education of students. This blog post is intended to set out my arguments. I acknowledge that my position is a minority view, but I think it is under-represented in the discussion.

I guess I have been prompted to do this by discussions I heard at ViCEPHEC. I couldn’t attend many sessions, but in the debate on Friday I was struck by how the term “Problem Solving” was not mentioned by anyone. I wondered whether my reasons for thinking Chemistry is worth studying were unusual, and whether setting out my view would be a useful contribution to the wider conversation.

Precis

In broad strokes, I want to present the issue as a matter of ringfencing lab hours while the overall size of a Chemistry curriculum shrinks. The result is to damage Problem Solving outcomes, which I judge to be the central merit of studying Chemistry.

Problem 1: the shrinking degree

We have been operating under a mass model of HE for about 20 years, and one increasingly aligned with the interests of employers. A growing emphasis on employability skills and more systematic academic support for entrants with non-elite prior outcomes have been additional pressures on curriculum space since the introduction of the 300h lab hour standard. Employability teaching often comes at the cost of disciplinary material, for example, though there are clever ways to somewhat reconcile these pressures.

At the same time as increasing demands on the curriculum, the overall size of degrees is typically shrinking. This is not Chemistry-specific. Student funding is so low that leaving students time for paid employment is often necessary, for example, and University funding is so low that sustaining the high contact hours of an elite degree is straightforwardly impossible in most institutions. Degrading the education in a Chemistry degree is normally the only way to respond to these pressures, making the pragmatic judgement that teaching something is better than teaching nothing.

Whatever the mechanism – the massification-employability agenda or chronic under-funding – the consequence has been to reduce the size of a modern Chemistry degree. It is a smaller education than it used to be.

Problem 2: ring-fencing labs

I am in the teaching labs on Tuesdays, and to some extent my job exists because someone is needed in the lab on Tuesdays. Like me, most of my community owe some fraction of their job (often a high fraction of their job) to the high workload demanded by lab time. This is a problem when the RSC accreditation criteria are reviewed, because it creates a vested interest: there is an important sense in which lab hours are protected because a political constituency of lab teachers has been established by the existence of mandated lab hours. The turkey should not vote for Christmas; the lab demonstrator should not vote to reduce lab hours.

Beyond defensive protectionism around the quantity of lab hours, there is also tremendous personal investment in high-quality lab teaching. This has resulted in fantastic professionalised lab teaching, which has been brilliant. Increasingly, I see labs as something championed by professional lab teachers in the same way that theoretical subjects are championed by professional researchers. The passion and stubbornness of an electrochemist protecting a lecture course in second year seems similar to the passion and stubbornness with which lab teachers protect labs. Honest people see sincere value in their corner of the curriculum, and are keen to sustain it. 

The big curriculum distinction between electrochemistry and labs is that the RSC is prepared to countenance a Chemistry degree with minimal electrochemistry. Cutting labs back to, say, 150h for a BSc? This would not satisfy the accreditation criteria.

But who decides what the criteria are? Trajectories into influential teaching positions often rely on lab teaching as a space to develop an academic profile; labs are undeniably important to the teaching community for their scope to advance careers. This means that many of the most-respected voices in education have backgrounds in lab teaching. Lab hours are protected, both by their status quo standing and their importance to the individuals in decision-making communities.

Synthesis

I see the central value of a Chemistry degree as being about the Problem Solving skills developed in the study of challenging theoretical material. There are limitations to this training, yes, but a graduate chemist is something worth becoming: these are people who are better than they used to be at long sequences of qualitative and mathematical reasoning. I’m proud to help people become good at solving problems in inorganic chemistry.

So here’s my problem. Degrees are shrinking, and lab time is aggressively ringfenced. Something has to give. You can’t cut practicals, so you cut theory. Labs are still on Tuesdays, but the Wednesday morning workshops disappear. You still run a Suzuki reaction in third year, but perhaps you don’t teach selenium reagents in organic synthesis any more to BSc students. Your titration sequences remain a staple in first year, but you hear conversations about whether students really need to do that much Stat Mech. There are subtleties and local arguments, but the broad picture is that Chemistry degrees are becoming less focused on Problem Solving because you can cut Problem Solving without troubling the RSC. If you think that Problem Solving is what our degrees are all about, this is a big problem.

I’m not oblivious to the way that labs can develop students’ Problem Solving skills to some extent, too. But there is a lot going on in a lab; it is not the most efficient place to think, even if it may be the most authentic. It is also worth saying that there are valuable skills beyond Problem Solving which can only be developed in the lab, and I hope that a smaller lab hour requirement can develop these appropriately.

Conclusion: dilution

Perhaps this is a whimsical analogy, but I fundamentally think of this as a dilution problem. We are using the same amount of fruit squash in a smaller cup. Maybe some people like a strong squash, but I don’t: it is undrinkably sweet. The awkward fact is that we are filling a smaller cup now, and it isn’t right to use the volumes appropriate to a larger one. If we want today’s students to get an exciting training in disciplinary Problem Solving, labs need to shrink or degrees need to (re)grow. Only one of those prospects seems realistic to me.

Dilution argument for the composition of a Chemistry degree. Using the same number of lab hours in a smaller degree leads to a very different education.