Innovative Tools For the Assessment of Instruction

Current ABET Evaluation places a strong emphasis on outcomes and assessment.At the ASEE 2009 Annual Conference in Austin, Texas, the authors presented a paper on the value of teaching Civil Engineering Courses using individualized student assignments.To validate that individualized instruction was more successful than the traditional group methods of instruction and assignments the authors developed an innovative means of measuring student performance.Objective (quantitative) comparison of student performance in courses from different years presented a challenge.Each course had different students; the common base was the instructor and the course material.The characteristic that changed in the before and after courses was the introduction of individual assignments in the after sections.To attempt to compare student and class performance in this situation, the authors developed an index system to assign a numerical value to individual student performance in a course and an index to quantify the overall performance of all students in the course.To assign a numerical value to the individual performance of a student an index called the Capability Index (CI) was developed as a measure of a student's personal performance as demonstrated by the relationship between the grade point (GP) they achieve in a course and their cumulative grade point average (CGPA) at the same time (CI=GP/CGPA).The cumulative GPA at the end of the course was used as a reasonable quantitative overall measure of a student's demonstrated capability at that point in time and because it is a readily determined value.The CI is strictly an index related to an individual student.If a student is consistently a straight "A" student or a straight "C" student then his or her CI will be 1.000.However the index will show relative improvement for a student not a straight "A" student or a decline in relative performance for a straight "A" student who fails to maintain straight "A's".To compare performance of groups of students an Effectiveness Index (EI) (the average of the CI indices for all the students in a course) was developed.It was hypothesized that a significant improvement in the EI may be used as an indicator of success of a new or different instructional strategy initiated to improve student performance.In that the EI is a measure of the average individual relative performance of all the students in a class it was the authors' proposition that it provided an objective measure of the success of a new instructional strategy such as the Individual Student Assignments proffered by the author's paper presented at the Austin Conference [1].This paper will present an extension of possible other uses for the indexes (Capability and Effectiveness) as tools for assessment of instruction.