Improving Student's Lab Practices: the Performance Grade

TL;DR

This paper proposes a performance grading system for students' lab practices that emphasizes observation-based assessment to foster positive skills like independence and teamwork, with analysis ensuring grading stability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel observation-based grading method for lab sessions and provides a quantitative analysis to ensure grading consistency.

Findings

Enhanced student engagement in lab practices

Improved acquisition of technical and soft skills

Validated grading stability through analysis

Abstract

Instilling good laboratory working attitudes in students is a difficult but very important task, especially in the first level courses. The introduction of a grade, based on the observation of work practices during laboratory sessions, can be strongly beneficial towards the acquisition of positive skills covering not only the technical aspects, but also the acquisition of both independence and team work. Explicit suggestions are given for basing the grade on specific observations and a quantitative analysis is performed to guarantee that the higher intrinsic volatility of the Performance Grade does not affect the final laboratory grade.