AP_Lab:
A Digitally Enabled Practical Assessment for Laboratory-based Practical Assessment in Engineering Education
Keywords:
e-assessment, student assessment, remote laboratory applications in engineering, digital education, educational technologyAbstract
In laboratory courses, students' practical performance must be evaluated systematically, and records must be kept reliably, clearly, and easily accessible. This study introduces the AP_Lab system, engineered with methodologies for conducting online practical assessments and providing a storage platform to facilitate laboratory instruction and evaluation. The system combines all course requirements, including the syllabus, lab manual, assessment rubrics, Bloom's taxonomy alignment, and standard operating procedure (SOP) compliance. The AP_Lab system has several connected interfaces for entering data, recording assessments, and tracing them back. Two test-run sessions were held to evaluate the system adequacy, the usability of the user interface and the functional integrity of the navigation links. The insights gained during the test runs were considered to further improve system functionality and design. The first test run included a group of teachers who had taught in a lab to ensure that the assessment workflow was both useful and appropriate. The AP_Lab system enabled rubric-centered assessment of individual procedural performance and group teamwork behaviour, while allowing assessors to replay video evidence and store all marks, comments and evidence links in a single retrievable record. These strengthen assessment traceability and reduce reliance on fragmented paper-based marking. User evaluation indicated high acceptance among students (n = 30) and lecturers (n = 10), with excellent reliability (Cronbach’s = 0.92 overall) and high mean satisfaction (4.21 0.5). Although lecturers rated the system slightly higher than students, the difference was not statistically significant.
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