Effectiveness of Experiment Design Guidelines for Virtual Laboratories in the SDVIcE tool

Abstract

Laboratory work is an integral part of science and engineering education. The nature and practices of laboratories have been changed by two new technology-intensive automations: simulated labs and remote labs as alternatives for conventional hands-on labs. Instructors play a critical role in leading effective laboratory experiences. The effectiveness of the laboratory work depends on the quality of the learning designs. The engineering instructors are not trained in designing effective virtual laboratory experiments. In order to facilitate the engineering instructors process of scientific experiment designs we have designed and developed guidelines and made them available online in the form of the SDVIcE tool. These guidelines cover all the major aspects of the scientific experiment design process such as decision regarding the broad goal of the experiment, formulation of learning objectives, selection of instructional strategy aligned to the goal of the experiment, designing tasks and assessment aligned to the instructional strategy and the learning objectives. We adopted the S-D-I-V-E (Scoping-Development-Internal Review-Validation-External Use) methodology synthesized from the existing methods followed by international bodies for developing each of the guidelines. In this paper we discuss the evaluation of the effectiveness of these guidelines by assessing the quality of the experiment designs by means of a rubric. As part of the evaluation we carried out field-testing with ten engineering instructors who designed four experiments each initially without using the guidelines and later using the guidelines. The scores of the experiment designs as per the rubric before and after the use of guidelines are analysed to arrive at the results regarding the effectiveness of the guidelines. The difference in the scores indicates that there is overall 80% improvement in the quality of the experiment designs after the engineering instructors used the guidelines. The instructors formulated learning objectives at higher cognitive levels such as analysis, evaluation and creation and also incorporated active learning strategies during the various phases of the experiment process after using the guidelines that was missing before the use of guidelines.