Progression of Student Independence in Laboratory Exercises at the Department of Automatic Control

Abstract

A graduate engineer should be able to work independently. The laboratory exercises for an engineering program therefore need to have a progression, requiring the students to work more independently in the laboratory as their education progresses without relying too much on teacher assistance. In this report we present our investigation regarding student
independence in laboratory exercises at the Department of Automatic Control at the Lund Institute of Technology. We set up several criteria based on pedagogical theory, which we use to evaluate four laboratory exercises from three courses of increasing difficulty. Our results suggest that there indeed is a progression towards more student independence in the laboratory exercises. However, according to our criteria there is little increase in independence between the first and second courses and a sharp increase between the second and third courses. We suggest different ways of addressing this and evening out the learning curve.