Effect of Reflective Assessment on Internalisation of CDIO Principles

CDIO initiative aims at creating engineers who can engineer through the use of a product life cycle as an educational framework. CDIO’s Standard 11 which refers to the CDIO Skills Assessment focuses on the assessment of student learning in personal, interpersonal, and product and system building skills, as well as in disciplinary knowledge. This paper presents an assessment rubric for a Multidisciplinary Engineering Design module in which the students are required to explicitly reflect on when did they Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate while working in a multidisciplinary team on a given project. To assess the effectiveness of the reflective component of the assessment, two groups of students were surveyed; the first group was assessed on the achievement of their learning outcomes, quality of the project submitted and the interpersonal skills while the second group was asked to reflect on the CDIO process frequently during the semester. The initial results show that asking the students to intentionally analyse their learning experience through the prism of CDIO creates more awareness of the CDIO as a process which can lead to internalisation of the process as a thinking and problem solving technique that can be used when learning other modules that are not design and build by nature.