Students' laboratory work performance assessment

Laboratory activities are very important in engineering education. Performance assessment of students’ laboratory work is time consuming and an ongoing challenge for teachers. Laboratory work performance assessment is traditionally done by the teacher grading students’ written report of the laboratory activity, despite the fact that the report is often 'doctored'. Assessment of laboratory work based solely on students’ reports has been criticized as failing to address espoused aims. The assessment situation of laboratory work is compounded by the widespread adoption of virtual laboratories (vlabs) where assessment is no less critical. This paper presents a laboratory work performance assessment model for the Virtual Electronic Laboratory (VEL) environment. The model harnesses the strengths of Bayesian Networks (BNs) and is based on ideas from Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), learning theories and definitions of learning.