2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP Using Automated Assessments for Accumulating Student Practice, Providing Students with Timely Feedback, and Informing Faculty on Student Performance

Presented at Work in Progress Papers in ECE

Topic our submission will address: Course and curriculum design, improvement, and assessment.

Practice and feedback are critical to learning in any context. Accumulation of practice and timely feedback can support development of some of the most sophisticated skills in engineering. One of the major backbones of designing an engineering course is developing methods for students to accumulate practice and receive timely feedback on their performance. Assessments and evaluations are the tools an instructor uses to measure how much knowledge students gain from the course. Assessments are the instruments instructors develop and administer to students to measure student knowledge. Evaluation is the process of analyzing assessment results and making informed conclusions about student performance.

One of the major challenges instructors face with assessments and evaluations is time constraints. Instructors are tasked with organizing class content, providing access to resources, planning class activities, and developing assessments and evaluations. Depending on class sizes, administering assessments with manual feedback or evaluation could be overwhelming and delay the timing of feedback. By automating the assessment and evaluation process, instructors can save time and quickly observe quantitative results of student performance and use this information to adapt classroom activities.
Students also benefit from automated assessments and evaluations. When these processes are done manually, there are larger time delays between practice and feedback, giving students less time to improve performance and adjust their approach to the course. Using automated assessments, students receive feedback earlier giving them clear information on course performance. Additionally, automated assessments can easily be reassigned and repeated depending on performance. The combination of earlier feedback and potential to repeat assessments allows students opportunities to adjust their approach and demonstrate improved performance.

In this work-in-progress paper, we present some automated assessment and evaluation strategies that can help students accumulate practice, obtain timely feedback, and inform instructors about student performance in a timely fashion. Various techniques for automated assessments in analog circuits, digital circuits, and signals courses will be described. The process for evaluating assessments will be discussed, followed by results of implementing these assessments. Results will include direct measurements on student performance, indirect measurements from student surveys, and faculty observations of the effects of automating assessments. Suggestions for future enhancements of these automated assessments will be provided.

We would prefer to present in a regular session over a poster because we would like to demonstrate a few of our automated assessments, and this would be much easier in a regular session.

Authors

Dr. Brian F. Thomson Temple University [biography]

Dr. Brian Thomson is an associate professor of instruction in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. During his time at Temple, he taught courses in circuits, circuits lab, control systems while serving as a mentor for senior capstone projects. In 2016, he was selected as the IEEE student chapter professor of the year. He has also graduated from the provost teaching academy where he studied learning behavior, course design, and teaching methods that cultivate engaging environments to meet learning objectives. He is actively involved with departmental curriculum enhancements to provide students with a high quality education experience and prepare them for a challenging and rewarding career in this field. His research interests include control systems, signal processing, autonomous vehicles, and robotics. Prior to joining Temple, Dr. Thomson held research positions at the Navigation R&D Lab, National High Magnetic Field Lab, and Applied Research Lab. His research in feedback control for nuclear magnetic resonance applications has a patent application published and was selected as a highlight for National High Magnetic Field Lab’s annual National Science Foundation report. He received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Penn State University. As an educator, he will continue to study and research engineering pedagogy. As a researcher, his interests include control systems, signal processing, autonomous vehicles, navigation systems, magnetic systems and magnetic resonance.
Cory Budischak http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0986-4297 Temple University [biography]

Cory is a teacher and researcher who strives to reduce the harmful effects of energy production and use. Teaching has always been his central passion. He started as a group tutor in college, which led him to his full time career as an Associate Professor of Instruction at Temple University in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has also taught a course "Electric Vehicles and the Grid" at the University of Delaware. He employs innovative instructional methods such as problem based learning, flipping the classroom, and teaching through interactive games. He finds it rewarding to reach students with these methods who may not have been reached by traditional lectures. His research focuses on the transition to 100% renewable energy and effective engineering instruction/support using problem based learning, flipped classroom approaches, design thinking, and co-curricular supports such as mentoring.

His main research focuses on two research questions:

1) What would our energy system look like if we make the shift towards 100% renewable energy and how much would the system cost? The research focuses not on a single energy system (electricity, transportation, agriculture), but the interaction among systems and taking a systems thinking approach.

2) How can learning and educational outcomes be improved with innovative instruction and co-curricular supports?

His research has appeared in Discovery News, The Huffington Post, Scientific American, and Rolling Stone Magazine. His outreach to the community has been featured in many local publications. He has presented his work all over the country including on the TEDx stage. He has done consulting work, including for the Chief Investment Officer of JPMorgan Chase, Michael Cembalest.

Cory received his Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware. He spent 8 years at Delaware Technical and Community College in the Energy Management Department as an Instructor and Department chair before transitioning to his current role at Temple University.

When Cory is not educating or researching, he enjoys backpacking, yoga, volleyball, and hiking with his family.
Maryam Alibeik

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