Investigating students' expectations and engagement in general and organic chemistry laboratory courses

Students’ expectations for their laboratory coursework are theorized to have an impact on their learning experiences and behaviors, such as engagement. Before students’ expectations and engagement can be explored in different types of undergraduate chemistry laboratory courses, appropriate measures of these constructs must be identified, and evidence of validity and reliability for the data collected with these instruments must be investigated. This study collected evidence related to response process validity, internal structure validity, and single administration reliability for version 2 of the Meaningful Learning in the Laboratory Instrument (MLLIv2) and a measure of student engagement in the undergraduate chemistry laboratory. Additionally, evidence of consequential validity was assessed through measurement invariance, providing support for the comparison of latent means between the groups. Differences in students’ expectations and engagement were found based on course-level (general vs. organic chemistry) and pedagogical style (cookbook vs. inquiry-based).