TOWARDS AN INTUITIVE AND OBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT FOR PROJECT-BASED MODULES

Assessing student design-implement skills in project-based modules integrated with CDIO framework has always been a challenging task to teaching staff. Even equipped with written rubrics, staff still assess the students’ performances based on their own understanding of observed students’ achievements as well as staff’s own interpretations of the given rubrics, which may vary from one teaching staff to another. This challenge is heightened for modules that have a large number of classes and involve more than 20 teaching staff, comprising both full-time and adjunct lecturers. The traditional rubrics often expect teaching staff to award marks ranging from 0 to 100 or from 0 to a preset maximum score. In reality, it is almost impossible to provide an equal number of different assessed works of students in different assessment fields to reflect that range of marks. This paper thus examines how an intuitive and objective assessment for one such project-based module - Introduction to Engineering. By applying this model, the teaching members of IE can simply match all the possible observable project criteria from a dropdown list of descriptors such as “Optimal and neat layout”, “Good and neat layout” …etc. for learning outcomes relating to design-implement skills. There is no need to specifically ensure that each assessment field has the maximum score when assessing. For any possible ambiguous interpretations, photos of past students’ work were captured and presented in another spreadsheet for reference. The work has also taken into account feedback and comments from 15 teaching staff, collected via a questionnaire and another 4 via causal conservations. After evaluating the usefulness of the assessment, a few missing observable criteria have been suggested for inclusion in the improved version of the assessment. Teaching staff commented on the ease of use and intuitive aspects of the assessment provided. Through visual inspection of the submitted projects done by the students, teaching staff only need to select the matching appropriate descriptors from the dropdown list provided in an excel spreadsheet. Most importantly, the teaching staff can also now make use of the descriptors to provide quick and meaningful feedback to students to support their learning.