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Original Articles

Development, Evaluation and Use of a Student Experience Survey in Undergraduate Science Laboratories: The Advancing Science by Enhancing Learning in the Laboratory Student Laboratory Learning Experience Survey

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Abstract

Student experience surveys have become increasingly popular to probe various aspects of processes and outcomes in higher education, such as measuring student perceptions of the learning environment and identifying aspects that could be improved. This paper reports on a particular survey for evaluating individual experiments that has been developed over some 15 years as part of a large national Australian study pertaining to the area of undergraduate laboratories—Advancing Science by Enhancing Learning in the Laboratory. This paper reports on the development of the survey instrument and the evaluation of the survey using student responses to experiments from different institutions in Australia, New Zealand and the USA. A total of 3153 student responses have been analysed using factor analysis. Three factors, motivation, assessment and resources, have been identified as contributing to improved student attitudes to laboratory activities. A central focus of the survey is to provide feedback to practitioners to iteratively improve experiments. Implications for practitioners and researchers are also discussed.

Acknowledgements

We thank the students from three countries for participating in this study by voluntarily completing surveys. Collection of data described in this work was authorised by the Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of Sydney, project number 12-2005/2/8807.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use italic font for survey item names and bold italic for factor names.

Additional information

Funding

We wish to thank the Australian government, for funding of this project over the past 15 years under the auspices of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (project number CG9-1049) and progenitor bodies.

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