Best Practices for the Implementation of Home-based, Hands-on Lab Activities to Effectively Engage STEM Students During a Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The current COVID-19 pandemic has forced many colleges and universities to remain on a completely online or remote educational learning environment for the 2020 Spring and Fall semesters, however there is a growing concern in STEM fields about how students will be able to achieve one of the major ABET learning outcomes without conducting physical, hands on laboratory exercises as many STEM disciplines are switching to virtual laboratory;an ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering/scientific judgment to draw conclusions. In addition to the limited achievement of the ABET outcomes, roughly half of the population of a historically black university communicated their anxieties during the pandemic to the University President via Change.org. The students' main anxiety is portrayed in a statement culled from the petition as follows “Most classes are very hands-on, and we are not able to do those from home because of the limited resources available at home”. This paper highlights the best practices for the implementation of home-based hands-on activities across multiple STEM fields. The paper further elaborates on the impact of remote and virtual labs on students' attitude, interest, and performance in STEM over the home-based hands-on experimentation. Home-based hands-on laboratory activities were performed in biology, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, transportation system, and civil engineering. The results of a Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaires (MLSQ) survey that was administered to about 100 STEM students revealed better gains in key constructs associated with student success, such as motivation, critical thinking, and metacognition. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021