Rationale for other good practical experiments

You have a decision to make as a chemistry teacher. After you have taken away the ten hours for the internal assessment and the ten hours for the Group 4 Project you are left with 20 hours for Standard level and 40 hours for Higher Level to do practical work. In fact you can spend more than this if you want to by using practical work to teach the theory but then you will have less classroom time unless you actually do have more than the 150/240 allotted hours to spend. Obviously some of this time should be spent on the mandatory experiments and also some on scaffolding to build up students’ expertise for the individual scientific investigation. However, certainly at Higher Level, there should still be time to do some practical work which will not lead to any sort of assessment but which will enhance the students’ understanding and enthusiasm for the subject. The experiments (listed on the left) in this section are exactly for that. Personally I would not get students to ‘write them up’ in the traditional sense but you would want them to be able to show that they understand the underlying theory by answering the questions at the end of each worksheet and to calculate any results that they may obtain.