Effectiveness of Educational Trainer Kits to Enhance the Technical Skills for Students

Educational Trainer kit (ETK) is one of the teaching methods to strengthen the acquisition of knowledge and technical skills. ETK addresses prevalent issue in the conventional teaching approach which hampers students from recalling and retaining what they have learnt in the classroom. Due to the importance of ETK, this paper shares the findings of a research pertaining to the effectiveness of ETK in enhancing teamwork and problem solving skills among engineering students. The respondents were 80 students from Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Politeknik Ibrahim Sultan, Johor Bahru and Politeknik Merlimau, Melaka. This quantitative research used survey questionnaire as the research instrument. The findings were analysed using SPSS version 17.0 and were presented in terms of percentage, mean score and standard deviation. The total average of mean score of each research question showed a total average of above 95.5% (strongly agree and agree). The results indicated that a significant majority of the respondents agreed that ETK successfully enhance their teamwork and problem solving skills, and it is important to have ETK that is infused with current technology. These results proved that ETK which is embedded with current technology is an effective method to strengthen and enhance the acquisition of knowledge and technical skills of engineering students. Therefore, it is imperative that polytechnics rigorously plan and develop more ETKs for effective classroom teaching and learning activities.