Assessment of hands-on experience and practical know-how acquired through electronics laboratories

Abstract

Although laboratory classes for engineering courses are designed to provide hands-on experience that is essential for future work as engineers, the acquisition of practical know-how from hands on experience is rarely assessed or evaluated. Assessments of the learning outcomes tend to focus on the achievement of explicit technical knowledge related to the cognitive domain. The implicit devaluation of hands-on experience could significantly impair engineering technology students‟ ability to acquire and value practical skills. Therefore developing new model to include effective assessment in psychomotor domain could be one way to overcome this problem. Thus the aim of this research is to validate the method for measuring the hands-on experience gained from laboratory classes via changes in practical know-how as indicated by skills acquired in the psychomotor domain. Practical know how was assessed using the method of novices-experts was used where the finding of students‟ attainment is compared to experts‟ acquisition. The results show that hands-on experience gained from laboratory classes can be accessed via psychomotor learning outcome. The finding can promote greater appreciation and better assessment practices of laboratory experiences.