Perceived Importance of Laboratory Learning Objectives by Female and Male Engineering Students

This paper is about the perceived importance of learning objective from female and male bachelor students of a process engineering program after participating in an immersive virtual reality laboratory experiment. The focus is set to the importance of the learning objectives regarding their future work. For the evaluation of the laboratory a questionnaire with the 13 fundamental learning objectives by Feisel and Rosa as well as the extension reported by the CrossLab joint project are used. The evaluation was carried out in an online survey using a 7-point Likert scale. The questionnaire contains two qualitative questions as well. The learning objectives are all perceived as more or less important but not neutral or unimportant. In contrast to preliminary findings, the statistical analysis shows that generally only the learning objective itself, and not gender, has a significant effect on the perceived importance of the learning objectives. According the gender there are only small difference between male and female students in a few learning objectives. The learning objectives data analysis, working style and teamwork are perceived to be most important, sensory awareness is the least important.