Student Assessment in Engineering Classes

• Activity Number: 518
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Julia Norton*+ and Farnaz Ganjeizadeh
• Companies: California State University, East Bay and California State University, East Bay
• Keywords: Educational assessment ; Learning ; Teaching ; Engineering

Abstract

Educators are faced with constructing and evaluating student learning in engineering courses by asking students how confident they are in the domain knowledge that they have obtained. For self-assessment of individual exam questions, students assign values to each question indicating their degree of correctness. This study is based on the responses from engineering students at three levels: Introductory, undergraduate junior or senior level, and a graduate level course. All three courses were taught as lectures which included analytic problem solving and case studies; hand-on Labs and an application paper solving engineering problems using qualitative and quantitative methods presented as a team. Students were asked to respond on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 not correct and 10 certain correct) to selected problems in the exams. The students' self- assessment scores were compared against their actual performance graded by the instructor. Additionally, a comparative analysis was conducted to measure the predictive correlation among the student self-assessment and actual grading based on the above three categories.