Comparison of instructional modalities for a course “Introduction to Computing in Engineering”

The Vanderbilt University School of Engineering requires all engineering students in their first semester to take a course which introduces computers in engineering. The question always arises about the best setting in which to teach this type of material: a combination of lecture and laboratory, or all laboratory. This year (2000), the course was organized with two different modalities of instruction. One was the lecture/laboratory and the other the all laboratory structure. At the end of the semester an in-depth questionnaire with quantitative ratings was given to the students to determine if there were differences in learning effectiveness. Contingency tables were used to compare responses. There were several statistically significant differences in student responses favoring the all laboratory structure. Several of them are: the students are much more comfortable with computers at the end of the semester; laboratory was by far the preferred setting for learning the computational topics; and lecture was not a preferred setting for learning any topic