Assessing Growth Of Engineering Students Using E Portfolios: A Mdl Based Approach

Overall premise of the work presented is to study the potential of e-portfolios as a viable mechanism for student reflection and assessment of growth on attributes that are part of becoming a World Class Engineer. These attributes relate to becoming: 1) Aware of the World, 2) Solidly Grounded, 3) Technically Broad, 4) Innovative, 5) Effective in Team Operations, and 6) Effective in Leadership Positions. Our project team has collected data from engineering student subjects who were enrolled in two different courses, and at various stages of their education. These portfolios were created by students intending to major in a wide range of engineering disciplines. Oneway ANOVAs and post-hoc tests were utilized to examine differences between the engineering discipline and students’ class standing (i.e., first-year students, sophomores, juniors, and seniors). Overall, our analysis indicates that our rubrics based on Alexander’s Model of Domain Learning (MDL) 2-4 are effective in assessing student development as captured in their e-portfolios. Introduction and Background E-portfolio development is a pedagogical tool that is promising as a means for promoting active learning. Portfolios are based on constructivist theory, which supports the principles of student-centered instruction and encourages instructional practice that fosters active learner involvement. Although portfolios have only recently become popular across academic disciplines, the fields of Arts and Education have used this practice to showcase students' work for some time. Consistent with the recent interest in the use of portfolios, in ABET criterion 3, portfolios are mentioned as one way to document and assess student outcomes 1 . A portfolio is a collection of work (“artifacts”) that demonstrates certain competencies from which the student has selected a subset to demonstrate growth over time. The portfolio contains a reflection on each artifact as well as an overall reflection on the content of the portfolio (see for example reference 6).One of the most important advantages of portfolios is their potential to engage students in intentional learning, resulting in an increased ability in life-long learning 7-12 . Portfolios are expected to have a positive effect on attitudinal, motivational, affective, and professional outcomes 13. These may include increased self-confidence, increased awareness of professional identity, more positive attitudes toward profession, improved career-decision self-efficacy, and increased ability to build a network of professionals. DiBiase 13 described many other potential benefits of e-portfolios including an increased learning effectiveness for students, the opportunity for faculty to leverage student motivation and align objectives and evaluation strategies, and the opportunity for a university to respond to calls for greater accountability and outcomes-based accreditation. While students gather evidence of their own learning, ideally they will go through the steps described in previous work P ge 14239.2 by Francis, Malder, and Stark 5 , starting with questioning and organizing, and ending with adapting. E-portfolio construction contributes to students’ development and internalization of active learning processes. Because these processes are needed to support life-long learning, portfolios have the potential to contribute to professional development well beyond the college years. With the current generation of students being greatly influenced by information technology 14 —reflected in, for example, an overwhelming interest in Facebook 15 , and the ease with which e-portfolios can be shared among various constituents as compared to paper portfolios, e-portfolios offer students a great learning opportunity that can guide them in becoming engaged learners. In this study we wanted to leverage these advantages and use e-portfolios as a formative assessment technique that would simultaneously promote student learning and allow for the on-going assessment of a set of student outcomes our College intends for our graduates. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) expects institutions to have detailed student learning objectives in place that are consistent with the institutions’ mission and with ABET’s criteria 16 . With the assistance of an external board made up of a broad cross section of industry leaders, The Pennsylvania State (Penn State) University’s College of Engineering has developed a set of attributes that address the inclusion of the new demands for professional skills 17 . Along these same lines, the Penn State College of Engineering strategic plan includes the mission to prepare students to become World Class Engineers (WCE) who are Aware of the World, Solidly Grounded in Fundamentals of their chosen engineering discipline, Technically Broad with respect to their knowledge in various engineering disciplines, Innovative, Effective in Teams, and Successful as Leaders. Our research team evaluated e-portfolios for evidence that students are developing on selected WCE attributes, namely Solidly Grounded and Effective in Teams. We chose these two WCE attributes, because they were most applicable to the courses in which eportfolios were required. We could not assess all six attributes because of time constraints. As part of developing an assessment tool for the e-portfolio content, we have established three criteria. First, in order for the assessment tools to be sensitive to the development of professional engineers, these tools must evaluate the attributes that comprise the World Class engineers. Second, the tools must be grounded in a recognized model of development. Third, because the intent is for e-portfolios to be used over time, the assessment techniques must be able to detect change. To meet these three criteria, we developed an assessment technique that synthesized a model of domain learning with the attributes of the World Class Engineer.