Assessment As The Driver Behind Operationalising Operations Research Teaching

Assessment is often viewed as a nasty afterthought to quantify learning. A cycle of action research and repeated adaptations to a semester project course at the University of Pretoria in South Africa indicate that the assessment process does, in fact, guide and enhance the learning experience. This paper reports on a case where a project was used to address relevancy issues of industrial engineering practitioners of operations research. A rubric was used as assessment tool in order to guide learners in terms of required competence. The applicable program deals with operations research which is often perceived to be demising as a decision support tool in industry. However, this is not actually true, as the relevancy and interdisciplinary nature of operations research makes it an indispensable part of operations management. What rather should be asked is how operations research is introduced and taught to undergraduate industrial engineering students. The results of our research indicate that learner perceptions and their resulting actions during the study period are indeed influenced by the selected assessment method.