ABSTRACT: This was a very educational piece because I learned a lot. I enjoyed writing this because it helped me understand more about electrical engineering. I compared two articles and used evidence to back up my claim.

To: Michael Coppola 

From: Bismah Hasan 

Date: March 9, 2020

Subject: Lab Reports Business Memo 

I write to evaluate and compare two lab reports regarding electrical engineering. The article “Teaching Sustainability Analysis in Electrical Engineering Lab Course” by David Braun focuses on how to teach students sustainability through electrical engineering lab courses. The article “Elevating Learner Achievement Using Formative Electronic Lab Assessments in the Engineering Laboratory: A viable Alternative to Weekly Lab Reports” by Baiyun Chen, Ronal F DeMara, et al, discusses how to use formative electronic lab assessment to help with different skills. The articles test the students’ ability to know different things. Both of these articles contain similarities and differences in their experiments and results. These articles also have misleading approaches to test the results. I will also provide solutions to better the results of both experiments.

 The article “Teaching Sustainability Analysis in Electrical Engineering Lab Course” uses methods in the lab for students to relate to sustainability. They establish an experiment that introduces and evaluates a simple strategy used to teach sustainability concepts in electrical engineering laboratory courses. It also teaches different definitions of sustainability to students. The article “Elevating Learner Achievement Using Formative Electronic Lab Assessments in the Engineering Laboratory: A viable Alternative to Weekly Lab Reports” uses a method to teach students general skills from electrical classes. The method they use to evaluate students’ skills is “formative assessment” and according to the article, it defines as “ formative assessment generally refers to diagnostic-process evaluations of students’ comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a course..”(pg 2). 

After evaluating both of these lab reports I discovered some flaws about the writing. “Elevating Learner Achievement Using Formative Electronic Lab Assessments in the Engineering Laboratory: A viable Alternative to Weekly Lab Reports” writing is too complicated for some people to comprehend. This article discusses some topics without providing any definitions or background knowledge. This can disinterest many readers. For instance, the article mentions ‘ELATED’ and ‘ELA’ on the first page, however, it failed to mention the purpose and thorough definition of these words. The article “Teaching Sustainability Analysis in Electrical Engineering Lab Course” also provides some misleading information regarding the experiment. For example, the box plot in figure 4 is confusing and the explanation is limited. The explanation mainly discusses how it relates to the study however, the reading of the box plot is not thoroughly explained (such as what the x and y values represent). Another misleading approach linked with both of the experiments is their testing method. Both articles utilize the student’s test results to evaluate their skills. However, the testing approach is not reliable. Both articles ask students to discuss how the lab course relates to each skill but these students have already learned how the lab class relates to sustainability and problem-solving skills. This means they automatically know during the testing how they should respond to the question. Therefore there is no way of knowing if the students learned the skills practically or just understood what they have been doing at lab classes. These are some of the deceptive techniques used in the article.