Electronics lab instructors' approaches to troubleshooting instruction

TL;DR

This study explores electronics lab instructors' teaching practices and perceptions regarding troubleshooting, revealing a gap between recognizing its importance and actively assessing students' troubleshooting skills.

Contribution

It provides qualitative insights into instructors' approaches and perceptions, highlighting the need for research-based instructional materials for troubleshooting.

Findings

Most instructors value troubleshooting as a key learning outcome.

Only half of the instructors directly assess troubleshooting skills.

There is a need for instructional materials addressing cognitive and non-cognitive troubleshooting aspects.

Abstract

In this exploratory qualitative study, we describe instructors' self-reported practices for teaching and assessing students' ability to troubleshoot in electronics lab courses. We collected audio data from interviews with 20 electronics instructors from 18 institutions that varied by size, selectivity, and other factors. In addition to describing participants' instructional practices, we characterize their perceptions about the role of troubleshooting in electronics, the importance of the ability to troubleshoot more generally, and what it means for students to be competent troubleshooters. One major finding of this work is that, while almost all instructors in our study said that troubleshooting is an important learning outcome for students in electronics lab courses, only half of instructors said they directly assessed students' ability to troubleshoot. Based on our findings, we argue that there is a need for research-based instructional materials that attend to both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of troubleshooting proficiency. We also identify several areas for future investigation related to troubleshooting instruction in electronics lab courses.