An Instructional Structure to Enhance Learning in Undergraduate Laboratories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Undergraduate laboratories are an important part of engineering and science curricula, as they have the potential to help students develop and improve many skills. Concerns, however, have been raised regarding the learning achieved in laboratories. This thesis provides a means of enhancing student knowledge in traditional undergraduate laboratories through the development and evaluation of an instructional structure. The instructional structure was developed based on modified Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, the expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation and multimedia design principles. Based on the instructional structure, web-based multimedia prelaboratory and postlaboratory exercises were developed which explain related theories, justify experimental procedures, and enable students to apply gained knowledge in new contexts. In addition, the exercises provided and demonstrated utility value of experiment-acquired knowledge. The instructional structure was developed and evaluated for two experiments in a second-year chemical engineering undergraduate laboratory course using an intervention cross-over methodology. Post-test case-control study design and surveys were used to assess the efficacy of the structure on student knowledge and motivation. Findings indicated that the prelaboratory exercises enhanced student knowledge through explanation of theories and rationale for experimental procedures. Further, this phase of conceptual understanding increased student motivation and encouraged them to be actively involved in learning while performing the experiment. Though results do not indicate a statistically significant increase in knowledge due to the postlaboratory exercises, students’ responses indicated that postlaboratories provided an opportunity to apply experiment-acquired knowledge to a new situation and integrate concepts learned in lecture with concepts learned in the lab course. There was also evidence that the instructional structure enhanced student breadth of knowledge. The instructional structure thus affords instructors a way to design prelaboratory and postlaboratory exercises to enhance student knowledge and motivation in undergraduate laboratories.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".