Goals of lab work in electronics: Student and staff ideas

Laboratory education plays an important role in engineering education, but research on it is sparse. A key issue in the design of lab instruction is the goals that are aimed at. We investigated teachers' and students' views on goals of an electronics lab: what goals are important for teachers and what goals do students think are aimed at in the lab sessions? Moreover, we studied whether students realise what lab goals their teachers find important and we compared ideas of students in different institutions. A written survey was developed consisting of a list of lab goals to be scored on a five-point Likert scale, an open question and a question asking for a ranking of the five most important goals of the list. Based on the Likert results and on the ranking question, different ordering methods are used to compare student answers of different institutions, student answers with teachers' views, and student ideas before and after instruction. There was no clear-cut most important goal, but rather a cluster of five important and three unimportant goals, both for teachers and students. They all found goals related to understanding concepts important, but disagreed on critical handling of data and practical applications. There were no major differences between institutions and students' ideas did not change after instruction.