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Assessment-related papers
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Assessing engineering students' modeling skills. By Thomas Lingefjärd A group of researchers in mathematics education from Australia, England, and Ireland who are concerned about how to detect and recognize students modeling achievement, have devised assessment strategies and a mathematical modeling test for measuring general and specific competencies in modeling and applications. The mathematical-modeling test used in this study is intended to collect evidence of growth in mathematical modeling competencies.
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Assessing the teaching & learning of mathematics in the mechanical engineering program at Chalmers Technical University. By Thomas Lingefjärd The way students actually learn mathematics, in or outside an engineering program, is hard to follow and analyze. This study for one and a half years so far illustrates that engineering students' conceptual growth in algebra depends more on the engineering subjects than on the algebra course, and that some of the concepts and routine skills in the algebra course seem to stay out of reach even after one year. Presented by Prof. Thomas Lingefjärd of Chalmers Technical University and Göteborg University at the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education conference in Athens, Georgia, USA, 26-29 October 2002.
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Assessment and mathematics examinations in the CDIO project. By Thomas Lingefjärd The fact that knowledge or understanding of mathematics is much more than just an ability to calculate or solve routine problems is well spread common knowledge among most of us who teach mathematics today. Yet, it can be very hard to really define what we mean by understanding mathematics. The fact that different taxonomies have been used for several years to illustrate how different levels of understanding or achievement can be matched against items of different conceptual difficulty is illustrated in this paper. Bloom's taxonomy and the MATH taxonomy are discussed in detail. This paper is a draft of a document to be used in faculty workshops at Chalmers Technical University and Göteborg University in Sweden.
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The CDIO Based Survey as a Useful Tool in the Monitoring and Evolution of the Curriculum in Mechanical and Materials Engineering Department at Queen's University, Canada. By U. Wyss, T. Bryant, N. Kubrick, C. Mechefske, P. Oosthuizen, D. Strong, B. Surgenor The department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering (MME) at Queen’s University adapts the curriculum like any other similar department on an ongoing basis with input from students, faculty, alumni/ ae and other sources. Joining the CDIO initiative and working with colleagues from around the world has been very helpful to set priorities for curriculum changes. A slightly modified version of the Queen’s University Belfast CDIO survey was used to get feedback from alumni/ ae. Some of the suggested changes have already been implemented, and work will continue on other ones. One of the challenges will be to repeat the survey in the future, to see if the changes made a difference. This paper was presented at the CDIO Annual Conference, 06-09 June 2005, Kingston, Ontario. They are posted here by permission of the author(s).
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Course Evaluations as a Means for Educational Improvements. By Peter Friis-Hansen, Niels Houbak, and Peder Klit A general evaluation of any education shall be based on the educations ability to meet defined goals and objectives. If such an evaluation is performed continuously it can be viewed as a relative quality measure. A main task when evaluating the whole education will be an evaluation of the individual courses. This may comprise of several parts: A lecturer evaluation/report, a student evaluation/report of the course and the lecturer(s), the number of students having passed the course, the grade average and the distribution of the grades.
At DTU (The Technical University of Denmark), students have for more than 10 years been evaluating the courses they attend. During the last 5 years, this evaluation has been completed electronically as an integral part of our CampusNet computing and course administration system. The electronic version has opened up for further analysis of the evaluation data and extraction of important information; this will be the main focus of this paper. In the evaluation of courses, the students are given seven different questions and for each question they can select between 5 different answers. Each answer is given a certain weight, and by summing up the weights for the selected answers and making an average over all the students, each course obtains a utility value. A similar set of questions and answers exists for all course lecturers. This paper was presented at the CDIO Annual Conference, 06-09 June 2005, Kingston, Ontario. They are posted here by permission of the author(s).
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Integrated Assessment of Disciplinary, Personal, and Interpersonal Skills in a Design-Build Course. By Kristina Edström, Khalid El Gaidi, Stefan Hallström and Jakob Kuttenkeuler Integrated assessment of functional disciplinary knowledge and personal and interpersonal performance is discussed in the context of a final-year design-build course. The course is intended to consolidate disciplinary knowledge through individual and teamwork efforts in an authentic design-build project. There is a coupling between approaching the task and practicing personal and interpersonal competencies. We believe that personal, interpersonal and disciplinary knowledge are mutually supportive and learned together. The learning objectives do therefore explicitly include knowledge, skills and attitudes related to personal, interpersonal and product and system building skills, as well as disciplinary skills. Since the assessment should reflect the course objectives a procedure for integrated assessment of the above mentioned competences was developed. This paper was submitted to the CDIO Annual Conference, 06-09 June 2005, Kingston, Ontario but not presented. They are posted here by permission of the author(s).
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Use of CDIO Standards in Swedish National Evaluation of Engineering Educational Programs. By Johan Malmqvist, Svante Gunnarsson, Kristina Edström and Sören Östlund In this paper, we report on a large-scale application of the CDIO standards, involving approximately 100 educational programs. The context is the Swedish national evaluation of its “civilingenjör” engineering degree programs made by the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education (Högskoleverket, HSV). In the paper, we first briefly describe the CDIO standards focusing on the role as a support for continuous program development. We then present the self-evaluation materials used in the HSV evaluation and account for HSV's motives for including the CDIO standards evaluation in the self-evaluation package and for the modifications made compared to the original CDIO standards. We then discuss the results from a survey and an interview study directed to the program managers that have applied the CDIO standards in the HSV evaluation. The questions in the survey aim to investigate the respondents' view of the relevance, benefits, limitations and ease of use of the CDIO standards. The questions are aimed both at the overall level – the body of standards – as well as at the level of single standards. This paper was presented at the CDIO Annual Conference, 06-09 June 2005, Kingston, Ontario. They are posted here by permission of the author(s).
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Using an Alumni Survey as a Tool for Program Evaluation. By Svante Gunnarsson, Eva Lindblad, Ingela Wiklund One part of the implementation of the CDIO concept at Linköping University is to develop and improve the tools for assessment of student knowledge and skills. As an assessment tool and as a quality management method at Linköping University the Balanced Scorecard is used. The method is also introduced as a CDIO assessment tool. At program level, Linköping University uses three surveys to meet demands within the Balanced Scorecard. An Introduction survey for beginners, a satisfactory survey for students in the middle of the program and an alumni-survey for engineers who have taken their degrees 10 years ago and 2 years ago are used. The satisfactory and the alumni surveys are developed and implemented during 2004- spring 2005.The alumni survey gives baseline knowledge of the engineer situation before the CDIO-concept and makes it possible to, within some years, evaluate the effects of the participation in the CDIO initiative. This paper was presented at the CDIO Annual Conference, 06-09 June 2005, Kingston, Ontario. They are posted here by permission of the author(s).
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Using portfolios for exit assessment in engineering programs. By D. Brodeur The MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics is designing a portfolio assessment system to assess students' achievement of program outcomes. The undergraduate aerospace engineering program has embarked upon major curriculum reform initiatives centered on 16 program outcomes detailed in its CDIO Syllabus. Portfolios will be organized into categories reflecting these outcomes. (The 16 CDIO skills, or program outcomes, are also the cornerstone of the program's self-study report for ABET accreditation.) This paper addresses the planning and development of portfolios for assessing students' achievement at the end of their MIT aerospace engineering program.  Presented at the ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Boston, MA, USA, 06-09 November 2002. Available here through the courtesy of the American Society of Engineering Education.
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Writing mathematics and assessment in the CDIO project.By T. Lingefjärd One growing concern about the change of how one assesses mathematics is often connected to the use of technology. Technology is used to reproduce pencil and paper work or in the development of concepts, and, consequently, one has to change the way assessment is practiced. One such change is to give students assignments where they are expected to communicate the mathematics through writing. This paper is a short example of how this can be connected to different taxonomies of levels of learning and understanding. This paper is a draft of a document to be used in faculty workshops at Chalmers Technical University and Göteborg University in Sweden.
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