Evaluation of Engineering Laboratories Muhammad Rashid ∗ , Imran A. Tasadduq ∗ , Yousuf Irfan Zia ∗ , Mohammad Al-Turkistany ∗ , and Saima Rashid † ∗ Department of Computer Engineering College of Computer and Information Systems, Umm Al-Qura University Makkah, Saudi Arabia Email: mfelahi@uqu.edu.sa † Department of Education, Hazara University Mansehra, Pakistan Abstract—Engineering studies consist of two parts: theory lec- tures and laboratory practices. Effectiveness of laboratories plays an important role in providing necessary design skills. However, evaluation of laboratories can be subjective and inconsistent. Consequently, a criterion is required to evaluate the engineering laboratories. This paper proposes an evaluation criterion for assessing the effectiveness of engineering laboratories in terms of pedagogic aspects. The identified pedagogic aspects in this paper are: relationship between theory and laboratory practice, content level, activity level, learning environment and laboratory manual. We evaluated seven different laboratories and generated recommendations based on our evaluation results. Index Terms—Assessment, engineering laboratories, evaluation criterion, pedagogic aspects, ABET, accreditation I. I NTRODUCTION The purpose of engineering education is the skillful man- agement of materials, energy, and information. It requires practical knowledge that goes beyond mere theory. This prac- tical knowledge is gained in engineering laboratories [1] [2]. Ironically, most of the attention was received by theory courses and little has been written about laboratory instructions [3]. It implies that very few research papers are available about the evaluation of laboratories. The current literature only describes the evaluation of educational objectives of laboratories [4]-[8]. In other words, no criterion exists for evaluating the pedagogic aspects of laboratories. This paper proposes an evaluation criterion for assessing the pedagogic aspects of laboratory activities. Pedagogic aspects are related to instructions and not the infrastructure required for the delivery of instructions. Consequently, we cover the following pedagogic aspects in this paper: • Relationship between theory and laboratory practice • Content level of experiments • Activity level of students • Learning environment in the laboratory • Effectiveness of laboratory manuals There is always a relationship between laboratory practice and the theory lecture that drives it. Four different possibilities are: complete independence, dependence across semesters, loose coupling and close coupling. Content level describes the type of content that is being addressed in the laboratory. We define three major types of content level as: least sophisticated, middle sophisticated and most sophisticated. Activity type of the students describes the kind of pedagogic activity in which the students are engaged. We have identified five different activity types: tutorial, project construction, experimentation, exploration and interpretation of the work of others. Similarly, we focus on three aspects of learning environment: teacher interaction, student collaboration and assessment of laboratory work. Finally, a laboratory manual matrix that summarizes the challenges involved in the development of laboratory manuals is used to evaluate its effectiveness. The proposed evaluation criterion is generic and can be applied to any engineering discipline. As a case study, we have chosen the computer engineering laboratories. The proposed methodology was successfully implemented in Computer En- gineering Department of Umm Al-Qura University. At the time of writing this paper, we were developing a criterion for the evaluation of implementation aspects that are related to the infrastructure required for the delivery of instructions in laboratories. Examples of implementation aspects include: facilities support, reliability and maintenance, safety issues and so on. The evaluation results of implementation aspects will be reported in another paper. This paper is organized as follows: Section II provides a brief review of existing assessment and evaluation method- ologies in engineering education. Section III presents the proposed evaluation criterion for the assessment of engineer- ing laboratories. Section IV applies the proposed evaluation criterion to laboratories of Computer Engineering Department at Umm Al-Qura University. Section V provides some rec- ommendations based on the assessment results. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section VI. II. REVIEW OF RELATED WORK The objective of this paper is to propose a criterion for the evaluation of engineering laboratories. There are several evaluation methodologies in the educational research literature. A subset of these is beginning to be used in engineering education research [3]. The nature of information required in this paper (evaluation results of engineering laboratories) is qualitative. An example of qualitative research methodology can be found in [7]. Other examples of qualitative methodolo- gies that have been repeatedly used in literature are surveys, interviews, and focus groups [6]. 2012 International Conference on Education and e-Learning Innovations 978-1-4673-2225-6/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE