One hundred nine students over three semesters took a Prior Experience Questionnaire and the Pittsburgh Freshman Engineering Survey as part of their initial Electrical and Computer Engineering lab. Twelve weeks later, each student was given a lab practical as part of this sophomore lab. The lab practical, given to the students the last week of the course, is used as the measure of ECE lab skills. The practical has the students perform basic measurements with a multimeter and an oscilloscope on a simple circuit that also requires the use of a power supply and a function generator. These skills were used throughout the semester long lab in various experiments. This practical is done individually and each result is observed by the Teaching Assistant. Correlations were then calculated between the survey results and the lab practical in an effort to determine what factors contribute to better lab practical scores and thus, hands on ability. The results show that most correlations are small. The highest correlations were Lab Grade and GPA, 0.65 and 0.45 respectively. When the partial correlations are taken correcting for GPA, the number of significant factors decreased by 30% and ACT scores became strongly correlated to the lab practical score. When females (approximately 10% of the sample population) were removed, there were no significant changes in the correlation results.
展开▼
