Assessing the impact of continuous evaluation strategies: tradeoff between student performance and instructor effort

[EN] Current opinion on undergraduate studies has led to a reformulation of teaching methodologies to base them not just on learning, but also on skills and competencies. In this approach, the teaching/learning process should accomplish both knowledge assimilation and skill development. Previous wor...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Poza-Lujan, Jose-Luis|||0000-0003-2450-9920, Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, Carlos Miguel|||0000-0001-5729-3041, Posadas-Yagüe, Juan-Luis|||0000-0002-5017-8689, Cano, Juan-Carlos|||0000-0002-0038-0539
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/65782
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/65782
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Continuous assessment
Formative assessment
Instructor wokload
Student performance
ARQUITECTURA Y TECNOLOGIA DE COMPUTADORES
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] Current opinion on undergraduate studies has led to a reformulation of teaching methodologies to base them not just on learning, but also on skills and competencies. In this approach, the teaching/learning process should accomplish both knowledge assimilation and skill development. Previous works demonstrated that a strategy that uses continuous evaluation is able to meet both objectives. However, those studies did not evaluate and quantify the additional effort required to implement such strategies. This paper evaluates the additional instructor effort required when implementing continuous evaluation in a first-year Computer Fundamentals course in the Computer Engineering degree program at the Technical University of Valencia, Spain. The experiment quantifies how instructor workload increases under different continuous evaluation strategies and how this affects the overall student grade. Both the standard continuous evaluation method and the intensive continuous evaluation method are analyzed, the latter being a proposal that builds upon the standard method by increasing the number of tests and examinations. The results obtained reveal that continuous evaluation improves student grades but that intensive continuous evaluation is liable to generate an excessive instructor overload without having a significant impact on student scores.