It is important that students turn up for our three hour laboratory practicals suitably prepared, but just providing the Lab Scripts in advance is not enough, as often students don’t read them! Now in Systems Engineering we embed a series of questions throughout the Scripts which are available on Blackboard in the form of a quiz.
Students are expected to do the quiz before they go to the Laboratory. As the associated theory behind each quiz questions is in the lab script, the students need to read much of the Lab script to do answer the questions!
A further benefit to this approach, as Judy Turner has pointed out, is that it benefits students with special needs: information in advance of the lab is useful for those with difficulties with multitasking and getting organised (dyspraxia), those who take longer to understand text (dyslexia), for people with anxiety issues. It can also be helpful for those with Aspergers syndrome who like to be organised and have routines.
In addition, feedback to Part 1 Systems Engineering students in their first term is provided through our ‘engagement’ system (see http://www.reading.ac.uk/engageinassessment/videos/eia-video-richard-mitchell-engagement.aspx, which assesses whether students are ‘engaging’ in each module. Participation in these quizzes is used to inform the judgement as to whether the students are engaged for the associated modules.
Some thoughts on using VLE to help students engage with Labs.