Activities

The design of learning activities in a lab setting depends on you, your students, the topic, the learning objectives, the equipment available, teaching assistant availability, and institutional support. Thus, the general guidance provided here may serve as a guide, but it will require the context of your environment and your own creativity. This page is intended to provide ideas to encourage creativity in lab activity design rather than serve as a comprehensive guide. 

Activity Design

Develop the outline and details of the lecture-lab experience. Activities in a laboratory are generally organized in the following way with considerable room for creativity regarding when and how students engage with the material:

1.      Introduction to topic and outline of activities

2.      Experimentation

3.      Analysis and discussion of results based on technical learning objectives

4.      Laboratory report writing instruction based on writing learning objectives

5.      Summary of expectations for written laboratory submission

A Model Instructional Strategy has been promoted for many years in the Excellence in Civil Engineering Education workshops by the American Society of Civil Engineers. It offers the following prompts, which form the basis for effective instruction in general. These prompts can also guide the delivery of a laboratory experience:

This approach is used in the example on the Home page. 

Activity Examples

The learning activities in a laboratory tend to offer the use of dedicated equipment, materials, or experiences that students otherwise do not have access to. Some options for structuring a laboratory lesson are provided here. 

A particular approach will respond to the following questions

Inquiry Lab

Inquiry labs present students with open questions and relatively little structure. Students attempt to answer the open questions through literature review and experimentation that they develop. These labs model the scientific method in their approach. For example, a simple circuit with a variable voltage source and a variety of resistors, along with an ammeter, might be offered to students to allow them to develop Ohm's Law (V=IR). 

To support such labs, students might be guided to use specific tools or methods of measurement. They may have prior knowledge of related theories. But, the procedure they follow is of their own making and thus what they discover becomes their own. These labs rely on an inductive approach to learning where observations of phenomena are used to develop general theories. 

Verification Lab

Verification labs employ experimentation and measurement to confirm theory. For example, a student would be presented with Euler's Critical Buckling Load equation and tasked with testing the buckling load of struts of various length and end restraint for comparison to the theoretical buckling load. 

This structure is very common in engineering labs, but there is literature to suggest that it is not as effective as inquiry labs. These labs follow a deductive approach where a general theory is offered and an experiment is suggested that confirms the theory. 

Lecture-Lab

Provide a board- or slide-based introductory lecture on the technical content and then conduct the lab. 

Handout-Driven Lab Activity

Provide all instruction and guidance in the form of a handout that allows students to be self-directed. Traditional lab manuals may fall into this category. 

Flipped Classroom

Provide preliminary technical or writing instruction in a video to be viewed prior to the laboratory. Experimentation and discussion can occur during the lab meeting.

Field Lab

Field trip or visit to a location outside of a dedicated classroom or laboratory. These labs can provide access to experiences that compliment classroom instruction and provide exposure to facilities normally not available to students. 

Computer Lab

Labs that involve software instruction often take place in a computer lab. Computer-based modeling or purely virtual experimentation can occur using a computer alone. 

Writing Activities

Integrating writing meaningfully into a laboratory course requires careful planning. Activities to support writing learning objectives can be arranged in numerous ways and can take considerable time during a lab period. Or activities can be integrated simply but effectively into established laboratory courses that did not previously incorporate writing instruction. 

This section will address both of these situations


Writing-Focused Lab

Labs that deal specifically with writing instruction as a primary goal. 

Lab Writing in Engineering

RAD Conclusions Lab

Labs that focus on technical content, but can benefit from students learning more about how to present results, analyze results, discuss sources of error and quality of results, and draw meaningful conclusions. 

Example:

Resources for use with Students

The Student's Guide to Engineering Lab Writing provides resources that students can use to learn about writing organization (format, reasoning, conventions), details about the various sections of a lab report document, and guidance in analysis methods common in engineering lab settings. 

As an instructor, you can also provide students with 

Many of these tools are included in the Student's Guide. They are available as easily adoptable Google Docs that you can modify to suit your specific laboratory.