IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION OF A NEW PBL ASSESSMENT MECHANISM

Professional engineering practice requires both technical and transversal skills, which raises the need to create modern learning methods that develop both. In alliance with CDIO, Problem Based Learning (PBL) has emerged as an effective way of learning and teaching since it fosters the enhancement of transversal competences along with the required technical ones. Moreover, PBL employs real world problems as a learning tool and encourages students to learn independently while being supported by academic facilitators. In PBL approaches, the assessment process is one of the common issues pointed out by students and faculty since it should not only assess technical knowledge, but also transversal competences. Therefore, various academic institutions have developed different assessments tools and mechanisms. However, whereas such tools work in a given learning environment, the social, technical, pedagogical, and other aspects make of its implementation in other environments a challenge. This paper presents the design and implementation of a new assessment framework to evaluate the student work within PBL courses. It addresses new techniques to measure the individual student’s contribution while he/she is working in a team to solve a real-life problem. Instead of the previously implemented assessment mechanism that involves only one mid-term and one final assessment, the new assessment mechanism suggests several individual and group sub-assessment tools distributed along the semester. The outcome of this new assessment framework is evaluated and compared to the previously implemented PBL assessment framework.