A multi-criteria method for improving the assessment of students’ laboratory work using online laboratory

• Autores: Hong Zhou, Zhongcheng Lei, Wenshan Hu, Qijun Deng Dongguo Zhou, Zhi-Wei Liu
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 33, no. 5, 2017, págs. 1654-1663
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Online laboratories have changed the way of assessing students’ laboratory work (lab work). Traditionally, students’ labwork is mainly assessed by their reports after the experiments, with their attendance considered as well. However, whetherthe students are actually engaged in experiments and how they perform their assignments are difficult to be tracedindividually, especially for the case of a large number of students. In this paper, a multi-criteria method for assessingstudents’ lab work based on online laboratory is proposed. Different from the hands-on labs, the online labs are able totrace and store more students’ activities automatically. Apart from the quality of the lab reports, the experimental datacollected from the database of the online laboratory as well as the snapshots of experimental steps are also considered.Therefore, judging criteria of lab work assessment can be extended to a higher standard, improving the assessment ofstudent learning with much more objectivity based on lab work related information rather than lab reports only. The papertakes Wuhan University (WHU) as a case study, where students in engineering are using Networked Control SystemLaboratory (NCSLab) as a tool to conduct experiments for their laboratory sessions. Generalized from the practicalteaching, the new assessment method is proved to be useful to judge students’ performance during the onlineexperimentation.