Measuring Practical Intelligence: the hidden dimension of ‘hands-on’ laboratory assessment in engineering technology courses

Abstract

Laboratory classes are valuable learning experiences and it is expected that students might acquire explicit and tacit knowledge or practical intelligence. This research has attempted to show the possibility of measuring practical intelligence that has not been assessed or measured in the past when evaluating different laboratory experiences for engineering students. These results demonstrated that practical intelligence (PI) can be measured by calculating the difference between participants’ ratings and the experts’ ratings. In the other words, the participants possessed a high level of practical intelligence, close to experts. The results demonstrate that we can devise effective ways to measure practical intelligence acquired by engineering students from laboratory experiences.