With the high-speed development of science and technology, students in colleges and universities are required to improve their practical and innovative abilities, especially for those majored in photoelectric engineering. However, it is difficult to achieve this goal if we only employ theoretical teaching and traditional experiments through which students are only required to verify some theorems and conclusions through the established operations. To address this issue, comprehensive

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... are adopted in many colleges and universities to enhance the students' ability of knowledge application and independent innovation. In this paper, an experiment, in which students are asked to design a system to detect the rotational speed, rotational direction and stop bit of a flywheel in real time by optoelectronic measurement, is given as an example to introduce the teaching reform of comprehensive experiments from three aspects including experimental design, teaching method and experimental evaluation. In experimental design, compared with traditional comprehensive experiments, we pay more attention to the practicability in project and the comprehensiveness of knowledge. For an experiment, its practical value can arouse students' interest, and it should cover as much professional knowledge as possible to improve the students' ability of synthetical knowledge application. In the course of experiment, to meet the requirement of cultivating students' self-learning ability, the experimental teaching method is adjusted from teacher-centered into student-centered. Besides, a scientific and reasonable experimental evaluation system is needed to motivate students to do experiments positively. Therefore, a new multifaceted evaluation system is set up to test students' grasp of theoretical knowledge, knowledge application ability, practical ability, innovation ability and team working ability comprehensively. Through five years of exploration and practice accumulation, our teaching mode of comprehensive experiments is verified to be effective to develop students' capability of knowledge application, practice and innovation.