WIP: A Systematic Approach for Outcome-Based Assessment

This research-to-practice WIP paper describes methods for improving assessment. Assessment is crucial for pro-gram accreditation and continuous improvement in engineering education. Outcome-based learning is a recent student-centred approach that can be used perform assessment. Under this paradigm, clear outcomes related to the knowledge and skills that the students should have after completing the course are identified and assessed. The student attainments are measured against the outcomes using clear and well-defined metrics. In this paper, an outcome-based strategy is proposed and used for assessing courses in control systems. In order to improve assessment reliability, the learning outcomes are broken down into sub-outcomes, which are used as performance indicators. The advantage of the proposed method is twofold, first it provides more accurate and reliable metrics for measuring student attainment, and second, the assessment results are personalized, allowing to evaluate individual students and identify means to help them. This approach also allows to identify common mistakes and misconceptions. Data are collected for several semesters and analyzed. It turns out that the proposed approach allows to obtain more accurate and reliable assessment results.