Improving Student Learning In The Che Laboratory

The unit operations lab brings together a significant number of educational goals for the students: experiencing a broad range of equipment and instrumentation, enhancing teaming skills, learning to analyze experimental data, and developing written and oral communication skills. To help improve the students' overall learning in laboratory so as to better prepare them for industry and/or graduate research, we have (1) created a new lecture course on engineering experimentation to accompany the laboratory, (2) increased the emphasis on experimental planning and data analysis for each lab project, (3) implemented a peer-review and report revision procedure, (4) require students to follow industry standards for recording data in laboratory notebooks, and (5) completely revised the department's Lab Manual to reflect these changes in emphasis. This paper describes the organization and effectiveness of our revised laboratory sequence in comparison with our previous approach.