To be able to design a laboratory course it is important to know what laboratory skills students possess before the course starts. This way the course can focus on developing skills in areas that are lacking. Despite the extensive literature on laboratory education, there are few studies on what laboratory skills students have at this stage of their education. In this work, we aimed to address this by surveying students’ percieved knowledge, experience and confidence of a range of laboratory competencies at the start of a chemistry degree. Our key findings were that students percieved to have knowledge, experience and confidence of performing lower-order competencies such as practical techniques, but lacked the knowledge, experience and confidence to perform higher-order competencies such as designing experiments. From our results, we propose that instructors should be aware that experiments focussing on certain practical skills may not teach students how to perform that technique but are providing more experience and confidence. We also propose instructors should use laboratory courses to teach higher-order skills such as experimental design and problem-solving where these skills are more evidently lacking.

中文翻译：

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学生认为在大学一开始就具备哪些实验室技能？

为了能够设计实验课程，在课程开始之前了解学生具备哪些实验技能很重要。这样，本课程可以专注于在缺乏的领域发展技能。尽管有大量关于实验室教育的文献，但是很少有关于学生在此教育阶段所具有的实验室技能的研究。在这项工作中，我们旨在通过在化学学位课程开始时调查学生对各种实验室能力的认知知识，经验和信心来解决此问题。我们的主要发现是，学生认为自己具有执行低级能力（例如实践技巧）的知识，经验和信心，但是缺乏执行较高级能力（例如设计实验）的知识，经验和信心。根据我们的结果，我们建议教师应该意识到，侧重于某些实践技能的实验可能不会教学生如何执行该技术，而是会提供更多的经验和信心。我们还建议讲师应该使用实验室课程来教那些显然缺乏这些技能的高级技能，例如实验设计和解决问题的技能。