This workshop, run in conjunction with the Royal Society of Chemistry, was attended by 26 participants from 23 institutions. The workshop was sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry . The student perspective on practical work is that there is too much information to handle at once, incoherence in courses, divorce of theory and practice, and too limited time spent in the laboratory.
Students read instructions line by line.
Practical work should be viewed in the broader sense. The skills that students are expected to pick up can be broken down to produce a skills grid. The way that students are given information needs analysing. An example of an experimental script that gave a holistic view was described. The flow chart gave the students an overview of the whole experiment.