Evaluating The Outcomes of Electrical Engineering Workshop Classes

Student experience surveys in engineering education typically assess the overall experience of a subject, covering aspects such as lectures, tutorials, laboratories and assessments. While they provide valuable insights into broad satisfaction, they often lack a focused evaluation of how students engage in specific environments such as laboratory or workshop classes, which are pivotal in providing students with hands-on experience, developing critical skills, and simulating real-world engineering environments. This study aims to evaluate student learning experiences across three learning domains - cognitive, psychomotor and affective - in a laboratory-based environment through a tailored survey instrument, adapted from existing frameworks. This survey was administered to students across thirteen subjects, spanning an electrical engineering degree programme, to evaluate the perceptions of their learning outcomes in their workshop classes. The results highlight strengths in instrumentation, guided experimentation and teamwork, while revealing several areas for improvement, including sensory awareness and safety, although there were some significant variations across some subjects. Subjects with more intensive teamwork and open-ended design projects tended to improve students' perceived learning in the cognitive and affective domains. The study has provided insights into how the workshop classes can be optimised to better align with professional engineering practices and accreditation requirements.