Lab Survey

Since this is the first semester English, reading and EAP students have had lab assignments and have been accountable for lab work, I sent out a survey to see how students perceived the lab and what we could do to help their learning experience. I expected to get a lot of responses like, "No more lab work" and "Don't make lab time required." Surprisingly, the students took the survey seriously and gave some good feed back. For instance, several people reported that one of the major hindrances in the lab was the noise level. I'd never really considered that as an obstacle. A lot of them wrote that the lack of space was a hindrance which I had predicted and hoped for. Eventually we hope to expand into the computer lab. I got mixed responses about the book work vs. The computer work. I think the overall consensus was that the book work was more helpful, but the computer work was more convenient. I'm not sure what to do about that. I don't like to have all of their assignments coming from different places because it causes confusion, especially for the older students. I think that may be one of the issues. The younger students prefer the computer work, but the older students who are not computer literate prefer the book work. I don't want to add one more task - learning to work the computer - on top of their reading or English instruction, but I don't want to take away the convenience of the computer assignments away from the students who have trouble getting to the lab all of the time. I could offer them the choice, but that might make it even more confusing. I'll have to figure out a good compromise.