Formative assessment to develop oral communication competency using YouTube: self- and peer assessment in engineering

Abstract

Obtaining oral communication competency is an important skill for engineering students to prepare them for interacting and working in any professional setting. For engineers, it is also important to be able to present technical information to non-technical audiences. To ensure oral competency, a non-graded formative assessment approach using video with self-and peer assessment was introduced into a final-year engineering thesis course. A low workload approach was used due to growing student numbers and higher pressures on academic staff. A quasi-experimental design was used to investigate the differences between traditional delivery, self-assessment and combined self-assessment with peer feedback. The study found that the formative models were seen by students to help develop their presentation skills. However, the results showed no significant improvement compared to the traditional method. This could be due to previous presentation practice within the degree or more probable, the lack of incentive for weaker students to engage and improve due to the ungraded nature of the activity.

Teaching programming in common first year engineering: discipline insights applying a flipped learning problem-solving approach

“…provided. This provides further support to research focused on self-efficacy and mindset that value of learning impacts a student's perception of difficulty and their approach and motivation to learn (Lahtinen et al 2005;Tek et al 2018) and as a result the students that are most in need of support structures are the ones less likely to take advantage of them (Nikolic and Raad 2017;Nikolic et al 2018). The relationship that relevance plays in motivating students to learn programming is possibly best seen within the civil and mining data;…”

Use of Self-Assessment of Video Recording to Raise Students’ Awareness of Development of Their Oral Presentation Skills

“…Not long after Charlie Ginsburg invented the video recorder in 1951 (Fukkink, Trienekens, & Kramer, 2011), video-recording was used for educational purposes to permit students to watch and assess their performance (Ritchie, 2016). As reliance on technology has increased, literature has continued to indicate that the use of video recording during communication has been found across many disciplines to be an effective way to help students adopt and learn from the observers' perspective (Hamilton, 2012;Guo, 2013;Nikolic, Stirling, & Ros, 2018).…”

“…Reviewing prior empirical research indicates that use of video recording has been found by many disciplines for many years to be an effective technique to help students evaluate and improve their oral presentation skills (Hamilton, 2012;Guo, 2013;Nikolic, Stirling, & Ros, 2018). Video recordings contribute positively to improve the student's learning if they are accompanied by an opportunity for the student to self-critique and provide their feedback (Paul, Dawson, Lanphear, & Cheema, 1998).…”

“…As a multisensory medium, video recording provides the advantage of improving students' understanding of their learning process (Swaffar & Vlatten, 1997;McNulty & Lazarevic, 2012;Murphy & Barry, 2016) along with the potential disadvantage of confusion caused by too much sensory information (Nikolic et al, 2018). To reduce confusion, we directed students to identify and focus on the main areas of their oral presentation skills that required immediate improvement rather than developing a set of specific criteria for their assessment.…”

Using CATME to Document and Improve the Effectiveness of Teamwork in Capstone Courses

“…Peer evaluation in the middle of the project also helps students to improve their team's performance [13]. Many researchers who have investigated the use of peer evaluations in engineering course [14]- [17] concluded that peer and self-evaluations increase student's teamwork skills [18] and motivate students to collaborate for the same teamwork goal [19]. CATME's peer evaluation framework includes five validated teamwork behavior dimensions: Contributing to the team's work, Interacting with teammates, Keeping the team on the track, Expecting quality, and Having relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs).…”