Use of online assessments to monitor learning outcomes in higher level engineering courses

The use of online systems for assessments has become increasingly popular over the past decade. There is a general consensus that these systems have tremendous potential for enhancing teaching and learning even at the tertiary level. Nevertheless, most past studies on the use of online assessments have been focused on lower level or foundational courses that have larger class sizes while the adoption rate in higher level courses is relatively smaller. Moreover, online assessments are generally well suited for building lower order cognitive skills that are commonly engaged in foundational courses. On the other hand, higher level courses tend to require students to exercise higher order cognitive skills. Thus, it is still an open question whether online assessments can be as effective in promoting higher order cognitive skills as lower order ones, even though they can also be potentially used to enhance teaching and learning in higher level courses. Therefore, in this study online assessments were adopted as a means for students and instructors to monitor the learning progress and outcomes of students in a higher level engineering course, in order determine whether (a) the online assessments helped to improve the general level of proficiency of the students in this course, and (b) there were clear links between the levels of cognitive skills engaged in the online assessments with the examination results and final grades. The key features of the online assessments used in this study were (a) each set of assessment questions consisted of questions with different levels of difficulty and marks, and (b) students were allowed to attempt any combination of questions to get a pre-determined maximum score. The results obtained in this study show that the online assessments seemed to be rather effective in enhancing the learning experience of the students and achieving their intended outcome of helping students monitor their own learning progress and level of achievement. Moreover, there was apparently a significant correlation between the level of achievement attained by a student for the difficult online assessment questions, which required the use of higher order cognitive skills, and the subsequent performance in the end-of-semester examination as well as the final grade obtained by the student.