Students' Assessment for Quantitative Measurement of Course Learning Outcomes in Online Class of Power Plant Instrumentation

Abstract

Due to COVID-19, engineering education has moved to an exclusive online mode, imposing various challenges for students and teachers. Many activities and methods have been introduced to improve teaching and increase students' engagement in online education. In this work, a trajectory-based pedagogy was used to enhance the associative learning and it was integrated with a trajectory based adaptive assessment to evaluate the students learning in the Power Plant Instrumentation Course of seventh semester. Evaluation was done in two modes; as a regular IRT mode, where students scored on their performance against individual question, and in trajectory-based assessment, students scored on the performance of previous question. For both assessments, scores were calculated as ‘Learning coefficients.’ Analysis of these learning coefficients demonstrated that in absence of innovative teaching pedagogy and assessment techniques, students may score good grades, but these are insufficient to measure the Course Learning outcomes. It is important to integrate new teaching pedagogies with complimenting assessments tools as a summative assessment to measure the Course Learning outcomes quantitatively during continuous evaluation conducted throughout the semester. This provides a robust method of assessment of students' knowledge in exclusive online education.