2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Teaching labs are a vital component of engineering education. They allow students to participate in all stages of experiential learning, beginning with conceptualization and exploration and progressing to reflection, analysis, and data interpretation. Laboratories promote a variety of abilities, including communication, knowledge, teamwork, ethics, and information acquisition, and they supplement lecture learning by improving students' understanding of theoretical topics. In addition, the importance of laboratories in engineering education is evident from two of the student learning outcomes required by ABET for program accreditation. The outcomes state that students must be able to conduct experiments, analyze and interpret data, and communicate effectively for those outcomes to be attained.

To achieve these objectives in in our engineering program, detailed lab report guidelines are provided for both students and laboratory instructors in all courses having a lab component. To complete their lab reports successfully, students need to correctly establish the scientific concept of the lab, effectively present the objectives and purpose of the lab, clearly explain how they perform their experiments, list and discuss the outcomes of the experiments, and finally draw logical conclusions out of these outcomes. In addition, students must present the findings clearly and with sufficient support and successfully integrate written and visual representations. In the conclusion section, students need to provide the main findings and state whether the results support or contradict the hypothesis being tested.

In this paper, we will demonstrate the program's experience with lab reports writing and rubric development over the last ten years, which includes three different phases. The first is when there was no standard lab report rubric with guidelines (before 2018), the second is when the first generation of standard lab report rubric and guidelines was introduced (2018-2022), and the third one is when an augmented versions of the standard lab report rubric were used (2023-2024). This paper will also include a comparison of the assessment results from various courses in the program, which shows the effect of rubrics in the improvement of students' technical writing and data interpretation skills through the three phases.