2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the increasing emphasis on project-based learning (PBL) and providing students with multidisciplinary teamwork experiences in engineering education, Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) programs have become an integral part of curricula at many universities. These VIP programs enable engineering students to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams to design solutions for real-world projects involving stakeholders over multiple semesters. Although there are multiple advantages of VIP programs, their unique and flexible structure raises questions about effective assessment practices that capture the professional and engineering design skills students are expected to further develop in these programs. Performance-based assessment (PBA), defined as an assessment method that evaluates students' ability to apply classroom learning to real-world problems, provides a suitable approach to assessment in VIP programs involving PBL. Grounded in the principles of evaluating participants through projects, presentations, and real-world tasks, PBA measures not just outcomes, but also processes, teamwork, and individual contributions.

However, such approaches to evaluating student performance face challenges in undergraduate contexts where students are accustomed to frequent quantitative grading. These challenges are further complicated in interdisciplinary contexts where students and instructors bring differing methods and priorities to their work. This exploratory qualitative study seeks to understand students' perceptions of PBA and focuses on the research question: How do undergraduate students perceive and experience the use of PBA in an interdisciplinary project-based learning course? Participants for this study are students who have completed a semester in the Interdisciplinary Projects (IDPro) program, where students work on multi-semester client-based projects. Student participants’ majors include several engineering disciplines (Aerospace, biomedical, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer engineering, Mechanical, and general engineering) as well as Chemistry, Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, Computational and Systems Neuroscience, Computational Modeling and Data Analytics, Psychology, and Sociology. Data collection involves student responses to a post-class survey with open-ended questions about their assessment experiences, followed by a focus group to deepen insights. The data will be systematically coded, categorized, and examined using thematic analysis to determine patterns and themes. This work-in-progress study examines students’ perceptions of PBA in an interdisciplinary project environment.