Student Learning

Assessment Process

Learning takes place in students’ minds where it is invisible to others. This means that learning must be assessed by evaluating their performance. Considering the course time frame, two independent tools were used to assess students’ learning and performance; a homework assignment and five in-class quizzes.

Homework assignments in CE461 are mostly a few problem-solving questions that consist of 5 different parts. I decided to dedicate each part of every homework problem to one of the desired learning objectives. Also, several evaluation criteria for grading each problem were considered and a rubric was developed based on them. A summary of what I did is tabulated as below; however, the details of the designed homework assignment can be found here:

Moreover, to test students’ learning regarding desired learning objectives, I designed five short in-class quizzes (one for each session). The quizzes consist of objective questions in various types (true-false, fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice). Although I considered the quizzes as a summative assessment, each quiz’s weight in each student’s final grade is approximately 0.25%. Also, since the quizzes are taken every session they can even be considered a formative assessment.

Rubric Development

Rubrics are a great way to have a fair grading. Also, they help the grader evaluate the students’ performance using a range of criteria. Five different criteria that can describe a student’s expected performance for problem-solving questions were developed as follows:

Reading the problem statement carefully.
Organizing an approach to solve the problem.
Applying the provided approach and plugging the given data into the steps to analyze the structure.
Reporting final numerical answers.
Providing an engineering judgment considering the reported final answer and responding to any requested discussion.

For each of these criteria, I designed a rating scale, as well as descriptors for that scale point. (See rubric)

Results

After I evaluated the students’ in-class work as a formative assessment, each student received feedback specific to their work. The purpose of this feedback was to give the students an opportunity to learn from their common mistakes before a summative assessment. It helped them a lot during homework assignments. I enclosed two examples of the students who used the received feedback and did well during homework assignments. (Example 1, Example 2)

In-class Quizzes were objective questions that had a short binary (YES/NO, TRUE/FALSE, etc.) answer. However, it is difficult to set a range of criteria and rating scale to develop a rubric for them. Consequently, their results cannot be considered for accurate assessment of students learning and do not indicate learning objective achievements. Nonetheless, they still can be used as a formative assessment. The graph shows that many students' performance for in-class quizzes improved over time, which implies the positive effects of in-class work.

Overall, students performed well in the unit, with the majority of students earning A and B grades considering all three learning objectives. I have included the distribution of students’ grades for each learning objective.

Learning Objective 1

The students’ learning for and achieving the first learning objective was successful, as near 100% of the got A in part B of all three homework problems. This means that all of them are able to describe the procedure for applying the slope-deflection method completely.

Learning Objective 2

The students’ achievement of the second learning objective can roughly be said was successful since most of the students who got B struggled with calculations or applying other principals of the structural analysis rather than the slope-deflection method.

Learning Objective 3

The students’ grades in part E shows that most of them are able to compare and contrast between displacement methods and force methods to determine the more time-efficient one in each case

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