A New Electronic Engineering Honours Assessment Scheme Based on Research Skills Development Framework

Abstract

Across Australian and other Western universities, engineering schools routinely offer a capstone project at the end of their undergraduate degree programs. From a learning perspective, the capstone project represents an opportunity to apply and synthesise new knowledge from previous coursework. One of the key learning outcomes of the project at our university is to impart significant and demonstrable research skills to the students, as consistent with Honours level expectations. However, it was apparent that the project assessment framework in use until 2009 did not allow the explicit development and effective measurement of research skills. Based on positive experiences from a trial on the use of the Research Skill Development (RSD) Framework (Willison and O’Regan 2007) in a Masters coursework component in 2006, our School chose to base the re-design of the Honours project assessment scheme on the RSD in 2010. The key to the new scheme is to explicitly inform candidates about the range of research skills that are needed to perform their research effectively, and provide quality feedback on how these candidates are performing. The scheme informs objective diagnostic and summative assessment of individual candidate’s work and of the work done by teams. This presentation gives an overview of how the RSD was adopted and deployed in the capstone, Honours (final) year electrical & electronic engineering project. Examples of the assessment matrices will be presented, as well as discussions on pedagogical and logistical lessons learnt from the initial deployment of our scheme. The presentation will conclude with a discussion on the possible future improvements and plans to evaluate the scheme.