Use of Student Self-Evaluations to Reinforce the Project Control Cycle

When attempting to teach the project control cycle, the importance of ‘evaluate’ is difficult to convey to students yet is critical to students’ academic and professional success. This paper represents a qualitative case study conducted with freshman construction management students to convey the importance of evaluating project performance – regardless if the project was a success or not. According to the course textbook, the hardest step of the project control cycle to implement is the last step of document, report and evaluate. Of these, the evaluation portion is even more difficult for a team to accomplish. In order to instill in students early in their degree program the importance of evaluation both to their academic and professional success, an assignment was developed and implemented with students enrolled in an introductory construction management course. Participation in this assignment was optional. Out of 110 students enrolled in the course, 52 completed the optional assignment. Thematic analysis was conducted on a sample of the students’ papers. The preliminary results provide insight into students’ evaluation of their success during their first semester, which is a critical semester in students’ college careers. Introduction Project Control is an interactive process in which actual performance is compared to planned performance with adjustment(s) being made to address identified deviations.The project control cycle has seven basic steps: (1) develop project plan, (2) establish benchmarks, (3) monitor project performance, (4) identify deviations, (5) evaluate corrective options, (6) make adjustment, and (7) document, report and evaluate. When attempting to teach this project control cycle, the importance of ‘evaluate’ can be difficult to convey to students. Interestingly, the importance of evaluation to successful management of a construction project is very similar to the importance of self-evaluation to students’ academic success, especially during their first year of college. During their first year of college, students are faced with many changes that they are often not equipped to handle. Students’ academic success often depends on how successfully and quickly they learn to navigate these changes during their first year of college. The development of selfreflections skills has been identified as a significant contributor to both their academic and professional success. However, it is often assumed that students will learn these skills while in college and that no specific instruction is needed in this area. This is simply not the case for many students, which means instructors need to identify ways to incorporate opportunities for development of self-reflection skills into their course work. Self-assessment is a technique of self-reflection that is an important skill for students to develop to be successful in academics beyond. This is especially true for construction management students who will be tasked with regular evaluation of both their individual and their teams’ success in the management of construction processes. This can be a challenging addition to many course due to other competing purposes set forth for the course. However, an introductory construction management P ge 26644.2 course provides an excellent opportunity to combine course objectives with facilitating development of students’ self-reflection skills through discussion of the project control cycle. Particularly, this paper represents a qualitative case study conducted with first year students enrolled in CON 101: Introduction to Construction Management on how to convey the importance of evaluating project performance – regardless if the project was a success or not – and facilitate development of their self-assessment skills. The purpose of the introductory course is to provide students with a fundamental understanding of the construction industry including: different industry sectors, different career paths, and the fundamental skills need to design, estimate, plan, and build a construction project. The project control cycle is taught as part of ‘building a construction project’ under the subheading ‘monitoring project performance’. As stated by the author of the course textbook, the hardest step of the project control cycle to implement is the last step of document, report and evaluate. Of these, the evaluation portion is even more difficult for a team to accomplish. Evaluating means to identify and share information about what worked and what did not work during the project. Throughout the course, analogies are made between the successful management of a construction project and an individual student’s successful completion of their construction management degree requirements. For example, one of the determinants of success for a construction project is how well the resources available to build the project (e.g. money, labor, materials, equipment, and subs) are managed. With respect to a student’s degree, their success is also dependent on their successful utilization of their resources. Similar to construction, students have limited funds to cover their schooling expenses and living expenses. They have limited time for work, classes, studying, and socializing. In order to instill in students early in their degree program the importance of evaluation both to construction management and to their individual success, an assignment was developed and implemented with students enrolled in CON 101. This assignment was optional and non-graded to encourage students to provide honest evaluations of their performance over the semester. Students did receive extra credit points for completing the paper, although these points were not a significant portion of their final grade. Students also were given the opportunity to complete an optional assignment if they needed the extra credit points but did not want to do the self-evaluation. Only two students who completed the extra credit assignment choose the alternative option. In the context of their education, students were asked to treat their performance during the semester as a project they would evaluate. Each student wrote a 1-2 page paper summarizing their evaluation. The instructions given to the students included the following: Write a 1-2 page analysis either of your performance in a particular course or your overall performance in all your courses. Identify the things that went well for you this semester and the things you can improve upon for next semester. Discuss your original goals, deviations from those goals, and corrective actions taken and the outcomes. Identify key lessons learned. P ge 26644.3 This paper presents the lessons learned by students through their self-evaluations and highlights common themes that emerged in the sample set of the students’ self-evaluations.