Designing continuous assessment to support experiential and project based learning

Designing continuous assessment to support experiential and project based learning

Teaching Context

Educator’s name: Dr Paul Beuchat and A/Prof Gavin Buskes
Subject name: Autonomous Systems Clinic (ELEN90090)
Discipline: Engineering
Faculty: Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology
Year level: Year 3 of the Master of Electrical Engineering or Master of Mechatronic Engineering
Class size: 35 students
Mode of delivery: On-campus

Details of Assessment Redesign

Assessment Design

This subject includes the following assessment tasks:

AT1. Mid-semester test (individual task, completed from Week 6-9, 10%)

AT2. Continuous individual assessment of project work (team and individual work, completed throughout the teaching period, 50%). Tasks include:

  1. Software and hardware upskilling, due in Week 4
  2. Individual preliminary report, due in Week 6
  3. Peer review of preliminary report (written and oral feedback), due in Week 7
  4. Demonstration of baseline robot capabilities and review meeting for forward planning, due in Week 9
  5. Team member evaluation and self-reflection for the demonstration and forward planning, due Week 9
  6. Demonstration of final project
  7. Self-reflection of whole subject, due in the examination period

AT3. Final team report, including team member evaluation (teamwork, due in the examination period, 30%)

AT4. Team video presentation (teamwork, due in the examination period, 10%)

Aim of the Assessment Design

Dr Paul Beuchat and A/Prof Gavin Buskes designed the assessment based on the principles of experiential learning, continuous assessment and project-based learning.

Featured Assessment Strategies

This subject showcases five of the seven practical strategies for improving assessment design and integrity. More details of each of these strategies are provided below.

Shift the emphasis from assessing product to assessing process

While this subject does feature some assessment tasks focused on product, there are also several opportunities for students to be assessed on the process of how they are working in their teams and the skills they are learning while completing the project (i.e., AT2c, AT2d, AT2e, AT2g).

Incorporate tasks that ask students to demonstrate evaluative judgement

In the continuous assessment task (AT2), there are two low-stakes assessed components (AT2c, AT2e) that require students to engage in review and assessment of their peers. In both cases, students are provided with assessment criteria to complete this task (for AT2c the students engage directly with the rubric for the preliminary report, and for AT2e an example instruction is: ‘rate your team members on the following criteria: made meaningful contributions to the reliability of the demonstration; made meaningful contributions to the development of a feasible forward plan.’).

Design nested or staged assessments

With the exception of the mid-semester test (AT1), the remaining assessment tasks in this subject build incrementally upon the previous tasks, over the course of the semester. For example, students begin their projects developing their practical skills for performing experiments with the robot (AT2a), then analyse these experimental results to show their individual technical contributions to the team through the preliminary report (AT2b), before demonstrating their team collective abilities through the Week 9 demonstration and planning meeting (AT2d) and the demonstration of their  final product (AT2f), and closing out the project with writing a report about the process (AT3), followed by a video presentation of the final product (AT4).

Diversify assessment formats

Across the different assessment tasks, different modalities are represented including written tasks (e.g., AT1 and AT3), video presentations (AT4), and oral presentations (AT2d and AT2f).

Incorporate more authentic, context-specific, or personal assignments

In this subject, students work collaboratively in teams to engineer an autonomous system (i.e., a robot) that performs a specified task. The assessment tasks that relate to this collaborative project are all aspects of the continuous assessment (AT2), the final team report (AT3), and the team video presentation (AT4). The development of this system and the related tasks are extremely authentic to the work of an electrical or mechatronic engineer who specialises in autonomous systems.

Further Reading

For more information about the design of this subject, please refer to the Course Handbook (here).