PROJECT TITLE :

Assessing the Impact of Continuous Evaluation Strategies: Tradeoff Between Student Performance and Instructor Effort

ABSTRACT:

Current opinion on undergraduate studies has led to a reformulation of teaching methodologies to base them not just on learning, however additionally on skills and competencies. In this approach, the teaching/learning process ought to accomplish each data assimilation and talent development. Previous works demonstrated that a strategy that uses continuous evaluation is able to fulfill each objectives. But, those studies did not evaluate and quantify the extra effort needed to implement such strategies. This paper evaluates the extra instructor effort needed when implementing continuous analysis 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 will increase under totally different continuous analysis strategies and how this affects the overall student grade. Each the “normal” continuous analysis methodology and therefore the intensive continuous analysis technique are analyzed, the latter being a proposal that builds upon the standard technique by increasing the amount of tests and examinations. The results obtained reveal that continuous analysis improves student grades but that intensive continuous evaluation is liable to come up with an excessive instructor overload while not having a significant impact on student scores.