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The learning domains such as cognitive, affective and psychomotor for Engineering Technology programs should be identified and valued. The acquisition of hands-on experience in workplace settings and laboratory classes is just as important as explicit technical knowledge, and should be measured in psychomotor domain. However, the explicit knowledge is valued in engineering technology education. Furthermore, practically all assessments measure cognitive value. This implicit devaluation of hands-on experience could significantly impair engineering technology students’ ability to acquire and value practical skills. Therefore, developing a new model to include effective assessment in psychomotor domain could be one way to overcome this problem. Thus, the aim of this project is to find ways to measure changes in hands-on experience in engineering laboratory classes. The second aim is to test the relationship between hands-on experiences acquired in laboratory classes with the ability to diagnose simple experiment faults in laboratory arrangements. The method of think-aloud is used in the research where the finding of students’ attainment is compared to experts’ acquisition. The results show that the value of psychomotor domain in laboratory classes via hands-on experience can be assessed and valued between two groups of students which is experiment and control group. Methodologies and detail results for this research are described in this project.

Previous research shows that experience or academically called ‘practical intelligence’ in the field of engineering can be measured through comparing experience to the experts in the field. The expert teaches and shows the students the ways to complete some practical tasks based on their own practical intelligence, which they developed for years and becomes their behaviors. Thus after some or repeated hands-on exercises, the level of students’ practical intelligence continuously developed and close to the experiences possesses by the experts. By this way, the level of practical intelligence can be assessed if it is referring to the experts score. A measuring instrument, an ‘Automated Engineers Testing Kits’ consisted of a partially completed circuit in which a battery provides power for a flash light. This is a semi-completed circuit which requires students to diagnose why the light does not work and complete the necessary connections. The authors hypothesize that practical intelligence measured in the context of constructing simple circuits used for laboratory experiments will be correlated with performance in real constructing tasks on similar complicated electrical circuits. The results show the correlations between the level of practical intelligence and the ability to construct the circuits. The methodology is described in the paper.

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