Assessing student knowledge of the learning objectives

Abstract

The Interprofessional Projects Program (IPRO®) at our university provides a six credit multi-disciplinary, project team based course required of all undergraduates which helps develop in these students various knowledge and skills deemed essential by ABET and future employers. This knowledge and skill, defined from our course Learning Objectives [LO], are competency in teamwork, communications, project management and ethical behavior, developed in the context of addressing a real world problem. Through this research, we are assessing whether or not students that participate in an IPRO course gain a more thorough understanding of the declarative knowledge supporting comprehension of the Learning Objectives by administering a knowledge test to each IPRO student both at the beginning and at the end of each semester. There are several reasons for giving these tests, one, faculty have asserted the hypothesis that the subject LO knowledge is gained through student work in other [non IPRO] courses and that the IPRO courses are unnecessary as general education requirements and two, faculty maintain that exposure to two IPRO courses is unnecessary as whatever needs to be learned about the LOs is/can be absorbed in one 3 credit course rather than two 3 credit courses. Our first goal for the research is to measure what students actually comprehend about the Learning Objectives. Our second goal is to evaluate how much LO knowledge the non IPRO departments provide students before/outside the IPRO courses. Next we want to learn if IPRO students beginning and ending LO knowledge varies by background and other demographic factors. Our final research goals are to isolate the gains made in declarative LO knowledge or other values received in a second IPRO course as opposed to a first IPRO course and to evaluate various techniques for improving the declarative knowledge [test scores] of our students. Many engineering programs have project based courses with similar learning objectives and the implications for engineering educators supporting these curriculum are related to measuring the acquisition of knowledge obtained directly from a course versus other courses or, for example, prerequisites. It is also beneficial to evaluate methods to measure the knowledge acquisition related to specific skills and behavior as described by learning objectives and defined competencies related to those Learning Objectives. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2006.