Insights from the First Year of Project # 2044472 “Improving the Conceptual Mastery of Engineering Students in High Enrollment Engineering Courses through Oral Exams
- Conference
- Location
-
Minneapolis, MN
- Publication Date
-
August 23, 2022
- Start Date
-
June 26, 2022
- End Date
-
June 29, 2022
- Conference Session
- Page Count
-
37
- DOI
-
10.18260/1-2--42102
- Permanent URL
-
https://peer.asee.org/42102
- Download Count
-
530
Paper Authors
Huihui Qi University of California, San Diego
Dr. Qi is an Assistant Teaching Professor at University of California, San Diego.
Curt Schurgers University of California, San Diego
Carolyn Sandoval University of California, San Diego
Leah Klement
Marko Lubarda University of California, San Diego
Marko Lubarda is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He teaches mechanics, materials science, design, computational analysis, and engineering mathematics courses, and has co-authored the undergraduate textbook Intermediate Solid Mechanics (Cambridge University Press, 2020). He is dedicated to engineering pedagogy and enriching students' learning experiences through teaching innovations, curriculum design, and support of undergraduate student research.
Minju Kim
University of California, San Diego
orcid.org/0000-0001-5878-7350
Hello, I am Minju Kim, a PhD Candidate in Experimental Psychology at UC San Diego. I am interested in promoting meaningful learning in engineering classes with research in class designs (e.g. implementing oral exams as assessments, scaffolding the bonding with the teaching team). I am also interested in designing summative and formative assessments that scaffold students with analogical transfer of their knowledge. I am looking for teaching postdoc positions for years 2023-2025 in Psychology and Education in general!
Alex Phan University of California, San Diego
He Liu
Mia Minnes University of California, San Diego
Nathan Delson University of California, San Diego
Nathan Delson is a Teaching Professor at the University of California at San Diego. His research interests include robotics, biomedical devices, and engineering education. He teaches introductory design, mechanics, mechatronics, capstone design, medical devices, and product design & entrepreneurship. His interests in design education includes increasing student motivation, teamwork, hands-on projects, and integration of theory into design projects. In 1999 he co-founded Coactive Drive Corporation (currently General Vibration), a company that provides haptic solutions. In 2016 Nate co-founded eGrove Education, Inc. an educational software company focused on teaching sketching and spatial visualization skills.
Saharnaz Baghdadchi University of California, San Diego
Saharnaz Baghdadchi is an Assistant Teaching Professor at UC San Diego. She is interested in scholarly teaching and uses active learning techniques to help students achieve expert-like level of thinking. She guides students in bridging the gap between facts and usable knowledge to solve complex engineering problems.
Maziar Ghazinejad University of California, San Diego
Josephine Relaford-Doyle University of California, San Diego
Celeste Pilegard University of California, San Diego
Xuan Gedney University of California, San Diego
Abstract
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.
Qi, H., & Schurgers, C., & Sandoval, C., & Klement, L., & Lubarda, M., & Kim, M., & Phan, A., & Liu, H., & Minnes, M., & Delson, N., & Baghdadchi, S., & Ghazinejad, M., & Relaford-Doyle, J., & Pilegard, C., & Gedney, X. (2022, August), Insights from the First Year of Project # 2044472 “Improving the Conceptual Mastery of Engineering Students in High Enrollment Engineering Courses through Oral Exams Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--42102
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2022 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015