Abstract:

During the 2018-19 academic year several lecturers of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) had reviewed the first-year laboratory lectures of both science and engineering degrees. In that work, some improvements and changes in the organization, methodology and assessment of different first-year subjects with laboratory activities were identified [1].

During the 2019-20 academic year some of the changes identified in [1] have been applied in Mechanics, a first-year subject of the Degree in Construction at the UIB, and analysed the differences in the final skills of the students between the actual academic year and the previous one. The most important changes in the laboratory lessons were the following: to move the laboratory sessions at the end of the course when all the theoretical lessons were finished; to improve the presentation of the instructions and procedures that students read before the laboratory sessions; to prepare deliverable tasks (to be done by the students before the laboratory sessions) to help students in the assessment of the most important skills needed in the laboratory and afterwards in the deliverable works; to prepare deliverable works for each of the laboratory experiments instead of submitting a report of a single experiment; to speed up the feedback for all the deliverables to avoid the student repeating the same mistakes once again.

The main objective of changing the structure of the laboratory lessons was to improve the degree of achievement in some of the skills that the students should develop during the experimental work in the laboratory, or the data analysis made afterwards with the data measured in the laboratory, such as the following ones:
1. To make a linear fit of experimental data and find a physical magnitude by the slope of the linear fit.
2. To quantify the measurement errors.
3. To calculate the error of the derived magnitudes.
4. To express the results with the appropriate significant digits.
5. To correctly express the results and the measurements with their corresponding units.
6. To graphically represent the results, using correctly the axes and adding the corresponding units.

The degree of achievement for each of the previous skills was evaluated by a binary system (fully reached or not fully reached) among all the students and the results from the 2018-19 and 2019-20 academic years were compared. Results show that after changing the above-mentioned teaching strategies all the skills were significantly improved, increasing the degree of achievement by a factor higher than 2.5 in most of the skills. Besides, these changes can be applied to other degrees and universities.

References:
[1] M.A. Jiménez, D. Moranta, J. Torrens, L. Ferrer, J.A. Jurado-Rivera, C. Palomino, A. Borràs, R. Santamarta, S. Tejada, A. Sureda, F. Masdeu, M.M. Bibiloni, “A Critical Review of the Organization, Methodology and Assessment in the First-Year Laboratory Lectures of Science and Engineering Degrees at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain), Proceedings of EDULEARN19 Conference, doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2019

Keywords:

Laboratory lessons, Skills improvement, Engineering degrees.