A Laboratory Format for Improved Student Participation

This paper describes a format for engineering laboratory courses that improves student participation in the laboratory experiments.Often in laboratory courses only one or two members of a student lab group actively participate in the laboratory exercise while others in the group stand around and observe.This is especially true in large laboratory sections with many student lab groups.This format helps ensure that all students in a lab group participate by giving each member of the lab group a title and a specific role in each laboratory exercise.This format has been used successfully by the author in a variety of different laboratory courses in three different institutions.