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How to evaluate a university lab course: a checklist

Checklist of eight points for evaluating a university lab course, from a written purpose and evidence beyond satisfaction to skills that build across years.
Use these questions before you trust a lab's satisfaction score Source: Based on Holmes et al. (2017) and Wilcox and Lewandowski (2016)
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A checklist for lab coordinators, programme committees and quality reviewers who evaluate laboratory courses. It starts from the lab's stated purpose and asks for evidence on that purpose, how students spend their time, and whether skills build across years. It draws on research showing that labs built to reinforce lecture content often add little to exam performance. Koji can collect students' own accounts of what they did in the lab through short conversational evaluations.

What's in this checklist

  • The lab's purpose is written down: content, skills, technique or something else
  • There is evidence for that purpose beyond student satisfaction
  • You know what students spend most of their lab time doing
  • Students make some of their own decisions about what and how to measure
  • Students get time to revise and explore, not just finish the steps
  • TAs and students describe the lab's goal in the same way
  • Lab skills build from one year to the next
  • Changes from the last review are visible to the next cohort

Use this image

Free to use in your docs, decks and posts under CC BY 4.0, as long as you credit Koji with a link to this page. To embed it, paste this into your page:

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<a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/lab-course-evaluation-checklist"><img src="https://www.koji.so/visuals/lab-course-evaluation-checklist/lab-course-evaluation-checklist.png" alt="Checklist of eight points for evaluating a university lab course, from a written purpose and evidence beyond satisfaction to skills that build across years." width="1200" height="632" /></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/lab-course-evaluation-checklist">How to evaluate a university lab course: a checklist</a>, Koji</p>

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