Why do engineering students attend labs? Staff and student reasons for lab attendance, desired group size and number of laboratories

Abstract

There is often poor attendance at timetabled laboratory sessions. Previous research into why university students attend lectures report major disincentives are: being ill, the lectures not being interesting and not examinable. However, there has been no work on student drivers to attend laboratories. The aim of this work was to find out why students do or do not attend labs, what their preferred duration and group size was.

The authors sent a questionnaire to students and staff in their Faculty of Engineering to find out what the drivers were for attendance and non attendance. Questions were also asked about lab duration and group size. 184 students and 43 staff questionnaires were returned.

It was found that the main reasons that students do not attend labs were similar to that stated in the literature for lectures. Students like small groups for their labs, but not groups of 3. They also prefer a larger number of shorter labs experiments rather than a smaller number of longer ones

Staff can encourage students to attend labs using the reasons that students believe them to be important. This work will aid teachers to incentivise students to attend their practical sessions.