Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre

Assessment for learning, assessment aligned to learning outcomes and assessment of group and team work are all areas of interest in engineering education along with how to give effective and timely feedback.

Assessment of Learning Outcomes

The Engineering Subject Centre Guide to the Assessment of Learning Outcomes aims to support academics developing and designing programmes and assessments based on learning outcomes.

The introduction of UK-SPEC and accreditation based on output standards has produced several issues, in particular how to identify evidence that learning outcomes are being met and at what level. The Engineering Subject Centre, Engineering Council (EC) and the Engineering Professors’ Council (EPC) formed an Assessment of Learning Outcomes Working Group to provide support to the engineering community to enhance the process of assessing learning outcomes. Experiences were shared between programme leaders and accreditation teams at the ALOE International Conference 2008.

The group also supported the development of the easimap tool, a web-based tool developed to allow programme leaders to demonstrating coverage of intended learning outcomes across a programme and evidence how learning outcomes these are assessed.

Assessment CETLs

The Subject Centre works with a number of Centre's for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) who have an assessment focus. One of our Associates, Roger Penlington is a fellow with the Assessment for Learning (AfL) CETL at Northumbria University. AfL is to foster student development in taking responsibility for evaluating, judging and improving their own performance by actively using a range of feedback.

Web PA is an online automated system which facilitates self and peer assessment of group work. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Subject Centres and the engCETL were partners in the JISC funded project which has produced an open source version of Web Peer Assessment (WebPA).

The Assessment Standards Knowledge exchange (ASKe) is based at Oxford Brookes University Business School. Resources available from ASKe include a series of '1,2,3' leaflets which highlight some practical ways in which teaching staff can improve their students' learning. Each leaflet focuses on a piece of assessment-related research and clearly states how that research can be applied to teaching practice in three easy steps.

Effective Feedback

The National Student Survey asks three key questions on feedback and the satisfaction scores are typically the lowest scores for all questions and frequently and indicate a perceived weakness in feedback practice across the engineering and technology sector, based on the student experience.

Student Enhanced Learning through Effective Feedback (SENLEF) was a project funded by the LTSN Generic Centre (now the Higher Education Academy) to develop a resource for practitioners wishing to improve their feedback practice to students or get some new ideas on how to enhance their current practice. The SENLEF guide includes seven principles for good effective practice and a series of case studies which includes examples from engineering.