According to Gresham’s Law, bad money will drive out good money (1). In economics the law applies to situations where two things of different value are either perceived to have equal value or are required to be accepted as having equal value. For example, if a government requires that all coins of the same denomination be accepted as legal tender but some of the coins contain smaller quantities of precious metal than others, then those debased coins will be used to pay for goods and services and the coins with more precious metal will be hoarded or even melted and sold as the metal. The bad coins drive the good ones from circulation. My observations of chemical education indicate that Gresham’s Law applies in our discipline as well.

Everyone would like textbooks to be as inexpensive for our students as possible. Used books are a good way to save money (and resources), but when bookstores sell used books at greater profit than new ones, there is less remuneration for the authors and publishers who do the major work of creating the textbooks in the first place. Publishers have merged with other publishers, cut costs by outsourcing many tasks, and gone to three-year revision cycles. Some students (those who purchase a new book in the revision year) pay a lot more, while others (who purchase a used book) pay somewhat less. The finished product is also debased. An author, for example, has requested that I forewarn our book review editor that he had tried, but failed, to correct egregious errors such as breaking chemical formulas across a line (Na on one line, Cl on the next) and weird hyphenations such as “fluori- de”. Such errors, presumably caused by a computer, would never have been made by an editor conversant with the subject, but such editors cost more than computer algorithms.

This is an extension of Gresham’s Law. We assume that a textbook is a textbook and have little opportunity to compare the quality of current textbooks with the quality that used to be achieved when each publisher had a cadre of editors and production staff who were fully conversant with the subject. Outsourcing cuts costs but it also means that many errors, some trivial, some substantive, are being introduced each time a textbook is revised and its re-composition outsourced. Authors can find and correct only so many errors, marked corrections are sometimes missed, quality is compromised, and students, who are understandably confused by errors in textbooks, are unnecessarily shortchanged. More experienced production staff and longer revision cycles would obviously be beneficial, but there is a negative incentive for publishers and authors to adopt such an approach. Bad production drives out the good, to the detriment of students, the ultimate users of the product.

Another potentially disastrous extension of Gresham’s Law involves virtual laboratory exercises. There is a real possibility that many educational institutions, at all levels, will look at the costs of real laboratories compared with computer-simulated virtual laboratories, and opt for the latter—much less expensive—alternative. This would be a bad thing. A “laboratory” program that is completely virtual cannot provide students with the same knowledge of chemistry that a real laboratory program can. For a long time, I have held that much of what students need to learn about chemistry is only accessible through direct, hands-on laboratory experience (2).

This is not to say that virtual is vacuous. People are making money via their avatars in the virtual world, Second Life (3), and Disney and others are creating virtual worlds for young children (4). Like virtual laboratories in chemistry, these virtual worlds can teach important lessons, often with much less risk to the learner. But if simulated laboratories are perceived to be of equal value in all respects, an academic Gresham’s Law will apply: Simulations will drive out real laboratories—those in which students: “appreciate that chemistry is an experimental science; know and appreciate certain chemical substances and their properties; have encountered and dealt with the problems of accurate measurement; and have learned manipulative skills” (2).

There are many examples of highly effective simulated laboratories. The ChemCollective project has many excellent simulated laboratories freely available (5). More are being created in collaborative fashion by teachers across the country. The laboratory program at my own institution includes some exercises that do not involve hands-on manipulation of chemicals and laboratory equipment. These exercises are pedagogically important in our program, and we would not want to do away with them. But we would also not want to do away with hands-on laboratory work in which students synthesize, analyze, measure, and experience the properties of chemical substances—even some that need to be handled with care and respect as a result of their dangerous properties.

Whether to completely replace real laboratories with virtual laboratories is likely to come up in your local area. Be on the watch for it and provide knowledgeable input with the goal of achieving the best possible education for chemistry students.

Literature Cited

1. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham’s_Law and http://eh.net/encyclopedia//article/selgin.gresham.law (accessed Feb 2008)

2. Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 1989, 66, 15-19.

3. http://secondlife.com/ (accessed Jan 2008)

4. Barnes, Brooks New York Times Monday, Dec 31, p C1.

5. http://www.chemcollective.org/ (accessed Feb 2008)

Note: A partial bibliography of articles about educational research on virtual laboratories is available at http://www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/2008/Apr/jceSubscriber/JCESupp/JCE2008p0475W.pdf

Virtual Laboratories as a teaching environment:…