Teaching labs form an essential part of undergraduate courses in many STEM courses as they are important places for students to learn the skills needed to be successful scientists and engineers. While the focus of teaching labs varies by discipline, there are many features including pedagogy, assessment, as well as logistics, that span across disciplinary boundaries. In the Teaching Labs SIG, we aim to share knowledge of what works well to benefit the entire community involved with teaching in labs and ultimately act to ensure excellence in the delivery of the student experience.
This year, the SIG is co-lead by:
- Michael Fox (Senior Teaching Fellow - Faculty of Natural Sciences)
- Peter Johnson (Principal Teaching Fellow - Faculty of Engineering)
Meeting Schedule:
We convene once a term to ensure everyone has the opportunity to participate and contribute. These meetings serve as a forum for lively discussions, presentations, demonstrations, and networking opportunities.
Communication Channels:
Our primary communication platform is Microsoft Teams. Here, you'll find updates on upcoming events (General Channel).
If you would like to join a SIG, fill out the form here to be added to the mailing list. You will then be informed about future activities.
Meeting history
Agenda
12.00 - Rapid Updates
12.10 - Discussion on GTA training, challenges, practicalities, and logistical solutions
12.30 - Continued discussion over lunch
13.00 - Desktop flow visualisation experiments for guided discovery of boundary layer - Peter Johnson
13.15 - Q&A
Summary
In the Rapid Updates we discussed the plans for a new Learning Management System (LMS) and what features might be useful or relevant for labs. On this, online/digital lab notebooks came up and how they might or might not integrate with a system. We then discussed the challenges of Technician recruitment and retention, encouraging people to feed into the currently negotiation between the Joint Trade Unions and the College on updating the terms.
The discussion on GTA training was very informative, with different departments clearly having some similar and some different challenges. Key issues hinged on numbers of available GTAs in a department and consequently how to enforce training requirements. The complexities of training at multiple levels: College Graduate School training, through to local pedagogical training, and training on specific experiments is a hierarchy of administration. We briefly discussed whether using the Graduate School training administration platform might be useful to unify all the training in one place.
Agenda
12.00 - Introductions/Lunch
12.15 - Katie Stripe - Inclusion and the transition to university project
12.45 - Discussion on transition materials for labs
Summary
Katie Stripe introduced her project building shared resources across departments to aid the transition to university by understanding the mathematical prerequisites for courses. We discussed whether a similar approach could be considered for lab skills. The shared aspects of teaching labs we found to be about building people's confidence in being in the lab and using equipment as well as breaking the idea of experiments being cookbook exercises. Many people commented that they do not have prerequisites for their first-year lab courses. Conversely, there was some discussion on the value of recognising students' prior knowledge when starting in the lab.
Agenda
12.00-12.30 - Intro and rapid updates
12.30-13.00 - Lunch and discussion
13.00-13.15 - Talk from Peter Johnson: A survey to evaluate laboratory activities across an undergraduate engineering degree programme
13.15-13.30 - Q&A and further discussion
Summary
Theme: Evaluation of teaching labs - how do we know a lab course is good?
We had a very informative discussion about the different ways that people evaluate their labs from Medical Biosciences, Computing, Physics, Chemistry, Materials, and Engineering. We discussed using surveys as well as student reflections to evaluate courses; and how feedback from later years on a degree course can help improve how courses are run in earlier years. Peter Johnson gave us a presentation on his survey that he has been running for 5 years to help guide decision making in the Mechanical Engineering labs, which led to conversations about how best to write and design surveys.
View the recording for this event (Imperial login required).
Agenda
12.00 - Rapid updates – Assessment and grading in labs
12.25 - Lunch and discussion
13.00 - External speaker - Ben Zwickl (RIT)
Summary
We had rapid updates from Priya Saravanapavan (Materials) and Stuart Mangles (Physics) on assessment in their teaching labs, followed by an in-depth discussion on the motivations and lessons learned from implementing different forms of assessment. Priya highlighted that in the first year course in Materials they get students to write parts of a lab report (e.g., an introduction, a figure, a results section) and provide feedback on those before asking students to construct a full lab report.
Ben Zwickl talked about using activity theory to think about the tensions around assessment in lab courses, providing a preview of his upcoming book chapter on the topic. This tension resonated with many in attendance. Ben highlighted that the tension can be navigated by narrowly defining the learning goals of a course and aligning assessment with those goals.
View the recording for this event (Imperial login required).
Agenda
12.00 – Welcome & Introductions
12.05 - Rapid updates
12.30 - Networking, discussion, lunch
13.00 - External speaker – Andrew Garrard and Harry Day (University of Sheffield)
13.20 - Q&A
Summary
As the inaugural meeting, we introduced the purpose of the SIG and asked people to provide short introductions to the teaching labs in their departments. We had contributions from:
Graham Axtell – Physics
Peter Johnson – Mechanical Engineering
Laura Patel – Chemistry
Paul Franklin – Materials
Umang Shah & James Campbell – Chemical Engineering
Our external speakers from the University of Sheffield talked to us about how they organise teaching labs for multiple different engineering disciplines within the department of Multidisciplinary Engineering Education. Both the introductions and external speakers spurred a great deal of conversation, with everyone very enthusiastic to find out what others are doing in their teaching labs
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