This project aims to enhance students’ learning in foundational engineering courses through oral exams based on the research conducted at the University of California San Diego. The adaptive dialogic nature of oral exams provides instructors an opportunity to better understand students’ thought processes, thus holding promise for improving both assessments of conceptual mastery and students’ learning attitudes and strategies. However, the issues of oral exam reliability, validity, and scalability have not been fully addressed. As with any assessment format, careful design is needed to maximize the benefits of oral exams to student learning and minimize the potential concerns. Compared to traditional written exams, oral exams have a unique design space, which involves a large range of parameters, including the type of oral assessment questions, grading criteria, how oral exams are administered, how questions are communicated and presented to the students, how feedback were provided, and other logistical perspectives such as weight of oral exam in overall course grade, frequency of oral assessment, etc.
In order to address the scalability for high enrollment classes, key elements of the project are the involvement of the entire instructional team (instructors and teaching assistants). Thus the project will create a new training program to prepare faculty and teaching assistants to administer oral exams that include considerations of issues such as bias and students with disabilities.
The purpose of this study is to create a framework to integrate oral exams in core undergraduate engineering courses, complementing existing assessment strategies by (1) creating a guideline to optimize the oral exam design parameters for the best students learning outcomes; and (2) Create a new training program to prepare faculty and teaching assistants to administer oral exams. The project will implement an iterative design strategy using an evidence-based approach of evaluation. The effectiveness of the oral exams will be evaluated by tracking student improvements on conceptual questions across consecutive oral exams in a single course, as well as across other courses.
Since its start in January 2021, the project is well underway. In this poster, we will present a summary of the results from year 1: (1) exploration of the oral exam design parameters, and its impact in students’ engagement and perception of oral exams towards learning; (2) the effectiveness of the newly developed instructor and teaching assistants training programs (3) The development of the evaluation instruments to gauge the project success; (4) instructors and teaching assistants experience and perceptions.
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The Engineering Design Process Portfolio Scoring Rubric (EDPPSR): Initial Validity and Reliability
Research prior to 2005 found that no single framework existed that could capture the engineering design process fully or well and benchmark each element of the process to a commonly accepted set of referenced artifacts. Compounding the construction of a stepwise, artifact driven framework is that engineering design is typically practiced over time as a complex and iterative process. For both novice and advanced students, learning and applying the design process is often cumulative, with many informal and formal programmatic opportunities to practice essential elements.
The Engineering Design Process Portfolio Scoring Rubric (EDPPSR) was designed to apply to any portfolio that is intended to document an individual or team driven process leading to an original attempt to design a product, process, or method to provide the best and most optimal solution to a genuine and meaningful problem. In essence, the portfolio should be a detailed account or “biography” of a project and the thought processes that inform that project. Besides narrative and explanatory text, entries may include (but need not be limited to) drawings, schematics, photographs, notebook and journal entries, transcripts or summaries of conversations and interviews, and audio/video recordings. Such entries are likely to be necessary in order to convey accurately and completely the complex thought processes behind the planning, implementation, and self-evaluation of the project. The rubric is comprised of four main components, each in turn comprised of three elements. Each element has its own holistic rubric.
The process by which the EDPPSR was created gives evidence of the relevance and representativeness of the rubric and helps to establish validity. The EDPPSR model as originally rendered has a strong theoretical foundation as it has been developed by reference to the literature on the steps of the design process through focus groups and through expert review by teachers, faculty and researchers in performance based, portfolio rubrics and assessments. Using the unified construct validity framework, the EDDPSR’s validity was further established through expert reviewers (experts in engineering design) providing evidence supporting the content relevance and representativeness of the EDPPSR in representing the basic process of engineering design.
This manuscript offers empirical evidence that supports the use of the EDPPSR model to evaluate student design-based projects in a reliable and valid manner. Intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) were calculated to determine the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of the rubric. Given the small sample size we also examined confidence intervals (95%) to provide a range of values in which the estimate of inter-reliability is likely contained.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10345718
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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