2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering courses particularly undergraduate engineering courses include practical learning through laboratory experiments. Laboratory experiments help students understand theoretical concepts. These teach students the practical skills required by their major. Soft skills of communication and teamwork are also taught through laboratories experiments as these involve students working in groups and students write reports of experiments performed.
This paper will present the perception of students about laboratory courses in ten different courses related to electrical and computer engineering technology. Student perception is obtained from the end of the year anonymous evaluations took by students for the laboratory courses taught by the author over last six years at two different institutions. In the comments of anonymous evaluations, the author had observed that students often mention the laboratory experiments as the best part of courses which have both theory and laboratory components. This paper will present statistics about such comments from all the laboratory courses the author has taught. Moreover, the regional public university where the author has taught for two years allows instructors to choose custom questions for the anonymous evaluations. The author includes two questions related to laboratories in those custom questions. These questions are 1) Laboratory experiments help to understand theoretical concepts 2) Laboratory experiments are interesting. Students reply to these questions on a five level Likert scale. This paper will present the student rating on these questions for various courses taught over two years and also compare those with the overall student ratings for each specific course. Some of the courses for which the student perception of laboratory are DC Circuits and Design, AC Circuits and Design, Electronics, and Introduction to Robotics and Automation.

The findings of this paper will show how students perceive the laboratory experiments and whether they agree with the hypothesis that laboratory experiments help to understand theoretical concepts. The data is obtained from students of two different institutions, for various courses taught over six years which will show the consistency in student perception.