Abstract:

Practicing during materials science courses is very important for engineering students. Here the students learn different aspects related with materials features, properties and performance including the influence of manufacturing over different materials such as metals plastics and ceramics. Moreover they learn how to apply different materials characterization techniques and the appropriated measurement and analysis of the results obtained to be capable to establish industrial standards. Nevertheless some topics are complicated to be understood and many students have expressed they felt in doubt about many aspects during theoretical lessons. The students expressed that the introduction of any entire new vocabulary full with new specific words and technical terms makes complicated to understand many topics during the course. Nevertheless the students admit that after laboratory practices they felt many concepts became clearer. Moreover they felt very motivated and their curiosity was waked up. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to evidence the importance of laboratory practices for a better understanding of the topics treated during the course. The student’s doubts during laboratory were counted to evaluate their understanding level; in addition the student’s opinions were asked in a questionnaire to identify the most complicated topics and their personal opinions were read in order to improve the teaching-learning process. It was found that the most complicated topics are those related with crystallography and phase diagram due to these topics are abstract and require to remember many mathematical and geometrical or physical concepts. A suggestion to improve the students’ performance is to dedicate more time to these topics during theoretical lessons, especially solving practical problems.

Keywords:

Reinforcement of theoretical knowledge, Laboratory practices, Student performance, Engineering courses.