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Increasing Hands-on Laboratory Equipment Experience via Rotation of Notebook Recording Duties

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Conference

2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

San Antonio, Texas

Publication Date

June 10, 2012

Start Date

June 10, 2012

End Date

June 13, 2012

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Electrical and Computer Poster Session

Tagged Division

Electrical and Computer

Page Count

11

Page Numbers

25.766.1 - 25.766.11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--21523

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/21523

Download Count

367

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Paper Authors

biography

Peter Mark Jansson P.E. Bucknell University

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Peter Mark Jansson is currently an Associate Professor of electrical engineering at Bucknell University. Prior to joining Bucknell, he was with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rowan University and spent nearly 20 years in professional engineering in large and small firms and as a consultant. He received his B.S. degree from MIT, an M.S.E. from Rowan University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and has more than 33 years of professional and academic experience in renewable energy and power systems. He is a registered Professional Engineer in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

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biography

David Kelley Bucknell University

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David F. Kelley received B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. From 1988 to 1989, he was a consultant for HY-Tech Research Corp., Radford, Virginia, where he developed software to predict electron trajectories past arbitrary charge distributions. From 1989 to 1990, he was with the Advanced Antennas group at Atlantic Aerospace Electronics Corporation (now part of L-3 Communications Titan Group), Greenbelt, Maryland, where he contributed to the development of radar cross section analysis software and to the simulation of signal detection in the presence of noise. From 1991 to 1993 he was a Senior Engineer with Information Systems Laboratories, Vienna, Va., where he worked in the areas of radar clutter mitigation and phased array design. After serving as a Visiting Professor at the Pennsylvania State University from 1999 to 2001, he joined Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Penn., where he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. His research interests include phased array antennas, reactively controlled antennas, computational electromagnetics, and biologically-inspired optimization algorithms. He is a member of ASEE, a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society, the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society, and the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. He has served on the Education Committee of the Antennas and Propagation Society since 2002 and became Chair of that committee in 2007.

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Abstract

Increasing Hands-On Laboratory Equipment Experience via Rotation of Notebook Recording DutiesAbstractInstructors often seek pedagogical innovations that will assure laboratory experiences aremeaningful and instructive for all participating students. The formation of lab teams of 2-3electrical engineering students is common but can lead to a division of labor that often worksagainst the desired learning outcomes for all members of the team. The authors have observedthat in many laboratory settings the participating students migrate to the portions of theassignments with which they are most comfortable, such as operating equipment, setting up theexperiment, taking notes and data, writing the final report, etc. Over time some students acquirethe competencies that the laboratory experiences are designed to develop, while others miss outon parts of these experiences. The authors have also observed that after four laboratory coursesthrough the freshman and sophomore years, some lab team members in their junior year wereunable to effectively operate EE laboratory equipment on their own.In an attempt to ensure that all students are active participants in the use of laboratory equipment,the instructors introduced a rotating schedule in which each week one student in a team isrequired to record results, observations, and comments in a professionally maintained notebookwhile the other student assembles circuitry and operates test equipment. The duties alternateevery week. This arrangement increases the likelihood that each student will operate thelaboratory equipment mostly on their own for half of the assignments. The completed laboratorynotebooks are due immediately after the lab period, so the note-taker can offer little help withcircuit assembly and equipment operation. The role of note-taker is all-consuming because theauthor must describe the details of the analyses, calculations, test configurations, data collectionmethods, and interpretations of results the team has accomplished during the lab session whilestrictly following standard laboratory notebook guidelines.In this paper the authors describe their observations, assessment and survey results for twosemester-long electronics laboratory courses in which the rotation of responsibilities describedabove was introduced to the student teams. In a blind pre-course survey 60% of the EE juniorsself reported that they often avoided using unfamiliar equipment, 57% reported they oftenpreferred courses without labs, and 42% struggled at times with linking theory to practice. Over20% reported “novice” to “some competence” skill level in working with operational amplifiers,troubleshooting circuits, and operating function generators and oscilloscopes, while greater than60% reported a low level of competence in rapidly logging results and notebook keeping. Theauthors share their assessment of the increase in student competencies observed via blind self-reporting surveys (pre- and post-course) as well as their anecdotal observations that corroboratethe results.

Jansson, P. M., & Kelley, D. (2012, June), Increasing Hands-on Laboratory Equipment Experience via Rotation of Notebook Recording Duties Paper presented at 2012 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, San Antonio, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--21523

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