2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Oral assessments provide various perceived benefits, such as improving students’ technical speaking skills, probing their conceptual understanding, positively contributing to academic integrity, increasing motivation to learn, and offering a venue for students to show competency by verbally explaining the problem solutions. Compared to these perceived benefits, their effectiveness in increasing learning gains has been less explored through quantitative measurements. In this paper, we provide the results of our pilot study designed to assess the potential effect of oral exams on improving student learning. In this study, students were randomly assigned into two groups. The first group participated in the oral assessment administered early in the term, and the second group participated in the one administered close to the end of the term. The oral exam questions were based on two Take-home (TH) tests consisting of circuit design questions assigned to students a few days before each oral exam. Although all students submitted the TH tests, only students in the corresponding groups participated in the follow-up oral assessments. All students also took a written midterm exam before the first TH test and a final exam at the end of the term. The written midterm and final exam grades are used to measure the effect of oral assessments and the time of intervention on student learning. Our study findings reveal that, although the final exam was a challenging test with a lower class average compared to the midterm exam, students who completed their oral assessments early in the term experienced a smaller drop in their grades compared to those who participated in the oral assessment near the end of the term. This result suggests that oral assessments could have a positive impact on student learning gains, and the timing of these interventions affects those benefits. The standard deviations of the midterm and final exam grades in both groups were also compared to each other. For the student group who received the intervention early on, the standard deviation of the grades reduced from 29.1% on the midterm exam to 20.6% on the final exam. The standard deviation of the grades for the other student group changed from 27.1% on the midterm exam to 22.8% on the final exam. The relatively large difference in the performances of students in the early intervention group decreased at the end of the term. The data suggests that oral assessments could have a positive impact on reducing the achievement gap among students. In this paper, we will also report students’ perceptions of the oral assessments and the extent to which they found these assessments useful to their learning and their confidence in themselves and their abilities.