Assessing the Effect of Laboratory Activities on Core Curricular Units of an Engineering Master’s Program: A Multivariate Analysis

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of laboratory activities on the results obtained by the students on 7 core curricular units (CUs) of an Integrated Master in Mechanical Engineering. Each CU is characterized by means of 4 performance indices, over the 6-year period 2014/2015–2019/2020. Firstly, individual indices in a per semester basis are compared. Secondly, the CUs are regarded as objects defined in a 4-dimensional space of features, and the multidimensional scaling (MDS) technique is adopted for clustering and computer visualization. The MDS is powerful for analyzing the multivariate dataset, unveiling patterns not perceived by standard statistical methods.