Continuous assessment in engineering education: a pilot study

Abstract

Learner-centred teaching inevitably involves continuously ongoing context-specific assessment of students understanding, attitudes, problem solving abilities, etc. At LTH Dept. of Electroscience students recognise this as an informal integrated part of the behaviour of appreciated teachers, who in turn claim they developed this rewarding strategy intuitively. The department has made classroom assessment methods familiar to its teachers, and formally integrated continuous student-feedback in all courses. Questionnaires show that in large classes (>80 students) positive effects of classroom assessment techniques are obvious to most students. In small classes (<30 students), the outcome is unclear, either due to well working subtle informal classroom communication (not obvious to students), or merely due absence of formative assessment.

To be efficient, formative assessment should be a “private” productive dialogue between teacher and class. It is therefore imperative from the schools´ perspective to monitor that formative assessment is ongoing without “ear-dropping” on the classroom dialogue. Such systems are possible to design, for instance by means of individual class-specific web-sites with restricted access and limited life-time. To secure continuity and robustness of the quality of each taught course, the final summative post-course evaluation includes the students and teachers evaluation of the formative assessment as a main element.