Laboratory education plays an important role in engineering education, but research on it is sparse. A key issue in the design of lab instruction is the goals that are aimed at. We investigated teachers' and students' views on goals of an electronics lab: what goals are important for teachers and what goals do students think are aimed at in the lab sessions? Moreover, we studied whether students realise what lab goals their teachers find important and we compared ideas of students in different institutions. A written survey was developed consisting of a list of lab goals to be scored on a five-point Likert scale, an open question and a question asking for a ranking of the five most important goals of the list. Based on the Likert results and on the ranking question, different ordering methods are used to compare student answers of different institutions, student answers with teachers' views, and student ideas before and after instruction. There was no clearcut most important goal, but rather a cluster of five important and three unimportant goals, both for teachers and students. They all found goals related to understanding concepts important, but disagreed on critical handling of data and practical applications. There were no major differences between institutions and students' ideas did not change after instruction.
A series of interviews with second year electronics engineering students showed several problems with understanding first-order RC filters. To better explore how widespread these problems are, a questionnaire was administered to over 150 students in Belgium. One question asked to rank the output voltage of a low-pass filter with an AC or DC input signal while a second asked to rank the output voltages of a high-pass filter with doubled or halved resistor and capacitor values. In addition to a discussion of the rankings and students' consistency, the results are compared to the most common reasoning patterns students used to explain their rankings. Despite lecture and laboratory instruction, students not only rarely recognize the circuits as filters, but also fail to correctly apply Kirchhoff's laws and Ohm's law to arrive at a correct answer.
Laboratories are an important part of science and engineering education, especially in the field of electronics. Yet very little research into the benefits of such labs to student learning exists. In particular, it is not well known what students do and, even more importantly, think during electronics laboratories. Therefore, we conducted a study based on video observation of second year students at 3 university campuses in Belgium during a traditional lab on first order RC filters. In this laboratory, students spent the majority of their time performing measurements, while very little time was spent processing or discussing the results. This in turn resulted in hardly any time spent talking about content knowledge. Based on those observations, a new laboratory was designed that includes a preparation with a virtual oscilloscope, a black box approach during the lab session itself, and a form of quick reporting at the end of the lab. This adjusted laboratory was evaluated using the same methodology and was more successful in the sense that the students spent less time gathering measurements and more time processing and analyzing them, resulting in more content-based discussion.
In a series of interviews with second year electronics engineering students, several of them showed problems with signal properties. In a questionnaire administered to over 150 students in Belgium, these problems were further explored to verify how widespread they are. The questions asked about different aspects of signals. Students showed that they understand the concept of a phase shift, although they have problems with the direction. However, they generally have no idea what a signal with two frequencies looks like in the time domain. Bode plots also proved to be a problem for students, who are not able to construct one from a set of (dummy) measurements. Most of these issues persist after lab instruction.
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