Taking the lecturer's role in undergraduate engineering modules: some experiences from formative assessment in the classroom

It has been proven that improving formative assessment can help students to raise their achievement and instructors to change their teaching practice. Although the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) focusses on competencies, designing and applying formative assessment aim to serve the purpose of promoting students’ learning. It differs from the assessment mainly conceived with the aims of scores, ranking, or certifying competence. A well-designed assessment activity provides feedback that both instructors and learners can use in assessing themselves as well as one another. The “formative” quality implies changes, i.e., teachers can adapt their strategies to meet learners’ needs whereas the latter can redesign their learning activities. Self-assessment is a key tool for goal achievement if students realize such goal and can assess what they must do to reach it. Peer assessment is a suitable complement to the former. In this work, we describe some experiences on the use of classroom response systems (CRS) in combination with guided classroom study, self-assessment and peer assessment in two modules for undergraduate Civil Engineering students. In the first approach, students are prompted to use CRS to either respond to a quiz or solve a problem. Later on, the teacher addresses the answer to the posed issue in the classroom, so students can measure their performance and have the opportunity to learn about their mistakes and lacks. Learning from failure can help them to redesign their learning technique to achieve their goals. Another action builds on the flipped classroom model. The teacher gives the students some support material (e-textbooks, printed material and multimedia resources) and some problems statements. They study at home and try to address these problems. The next class day, the teacher delivers one problem to be solved in the classroom. There are no two data sets alike, although they can address the problem in groups or pairs. After a given time, the exercises are collected and delivered back randomly. Then the teacher solves the problem, so each one has the chance to review another classmate’s exercise. Anonymity is ensured, so they feel more confident. Digital resources are helpful in this stage of the class session in order to improve the leverage of the subject. We conducted questionnaires to obtain students’ perceptions on the effectiveness of the implemented model. They agreed that their attendance level increased due to the bigger interest of impartations. Besides, the rapid feedback from the quizzes helped them to identify their knowledge lacks. Results show that both formative assessment and CRS can be helpful to increase student engagement in learning activities, either in large groups or in a medium lecture-class size. We received students’ positive feedback, although we could not find significant learning improvement. Surprisingly, around 10% of participating students are not comfortable with taking the lecturer’s role or do not rely on peer review. We draw some conclusions and reflections on effective questioning and the use of these tools to boost their engagement and achievement.