Fine-tuning formative and summative assessment in Bachelors' Final Projects

Abstract

The role of Bachelors' Final Projects (BFP) in Engineering Education is critical since it offers the opportunity for students to integrate the application of specific and transversal competences they have developed along the degree. However, given the special characteristics of this curriculum component (personalized according to the student's interests, multiple teachers involved, assessment by changing boards, etc.), the systematization of its formative and summative assessment has been extensively recognized as problematic but highly necessary. To face this problem, there are several recent initiatives reported in the literature that propose a set of rubrics as tools for project advisors and board members to structure the assessment. In this paper, we report the experience in the Engineering School at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) applying this approach based on rubrics as part of an assessment guide for BFP (Teacher's Guide to Monitoring and Assessment for BFP, designed by the support unit for teaching quality and innovation of the engineering school - USQUID-ESUP). A quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the experience provides insights about the utility, pertinence, user-friendliness, preciseness and actual use of the proposed guide. The findings indicate that several aspects of the approach applied should be revised considering the characteristics of the context of use. These aspects include the need of providing a tool for the integrated assessment of transversal and specific competences and the interest of providing a summarized version of the rubrics that can be used using mobile devices (tablets, smart phones) during board meetings. The design of this summarized version considers an aggregation of the assessment indicators associated to competences. The paper presents these findings and the designs decisions applied towards a revised version of the assessment guide for BFP.