Imparting psychomotor skills to the learners using computer aided instructions in Engineering Education

Abstract

Psychomotor skills provide a capability to learners to perform a task with reasonable competence. Various levels of competencies in psychomotor skills are Imitation / Observation, Manipulation, Precision /Competent, Articulation / consolidation and Naturalization & Mastery. In Engineering education psychomotor skills form a very important set of skills that need to be acquired by the students to satisfy overall employability skills requirements. Computer aided instructions are extensively used for improving teaching-learning process across a wide range of subjects but specially in the cognitive learning domain resulting in improved learning effectiveness in that learning domain. In this paper a structured computer aided instructions methodology has been developed to improve psychomotor skills in teaching and learning of turbo-machines. This paper addresses the issue of improvement in effectiveness of learning in the psychomotor learning domain through computer aided instructions. This research area requires extensive attention from the researchers to make teaching and learning in this important domain of learning enjoyable as well as effective. The instructions designed include a brief introduction of the skills set that learners are required to master at the beginning of the laboratory session. Learners are then asked to explore a specially designed computer aided presentation which includes video demonstration of the experiment coupled with suitable animations. This enables students to link skills required with the presentation by identifying skills associated with different parts of the presentation. The above strategy has been well received by the students and overall performance indicators have shown consistent improvement ever since the computer aided instructions have been incorporated in the overall teaching and learning strategy