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)

Abstract

[eng] Lecturers of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain) have critically reviewed the first-year laboratory lectures of science for Biology, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Physics and engineering degrees. In all the studies, the experiments conducted in the laboratory help in the achievement of specific, generic and basic skills of each degree. We found that for the sciences degrees the organization of the laboratory sessions (6 ECTS credits) was very close, although the experiments and the techniques used were different. In all cases, the first session is mainly devoted to inform about the security rules, the delivery works and the grading. Before each laboratory session, students must read the protocol of the experiments to be done with a detailed explanation of all the steps, measurements and computations required in the session. In some cases (Chemistry and Biology) all the experimental activities have to be reported in a laboratory notebook, a tool that is commonly used in the research of these fields. The assessment mainly consists on delivering works for each experiment, writing an extended report of one single experiment, a practical and/or theoretical exam and the evaluation of the attitude/ability during the sessions, all of them with different weights to compute the final mark. The organization of the laboratory sessions in engineering is slightly different because they are part of a science course with other theory and practical lectures. As a result, to compute the final mark of the course the laboratory lectures weight about 25%. The methodology is like the one of sciences degrees, but the assessment only consists on delivering a single extended report of a randomly assigned experiment. Some of the improvements/changes discussed for the sciences degrees are: (i) the proposal of a coordinator lecturer to guarantee that all the groups are operating in the same way (specially the assessment); (ii) the preparation of a questionnaire to be answered by the students before starting the experiment to ensure that they have understood the goal and the methodology; (iii) to guarantee that students receive feedback of deliverable works as soon as possible in order to improve their quality as the course progresses; (iv) to check that the document with the explanation of the experiment is clear (improve the layout and incorporate some short videos); and (v) to define some items to assess quantitatively the students' attitude/ability during the different laboratory sessions. Particularly, for engineering degrees some other aspects could be changed/improved, such as: (i) strengthen the links between the experimental and theoretical lectures in order to deepen the knowledge of the contents of the course; (ii) use the first session to explain the organization of the laboratory lectures, the methodology and the assessment, with special emphasis in the deliverable works (the computations and results therein); (iii) use deliverable works for the assessment of every experiment (instead of one extended report) to guarantee that the students have understood all the experiments; and (iv) set a minimum mark to avoid that students pass the course without attending to the practical lectures. The aim of the proposed guidelines is to improve the organization, the methodology and the assessment of the laboratory lectures of first-year courses of science and engineering degrees.