Assessment of Team Projects in an Electrical Power Systems Course

With team-project-based courses the challenge has been assessment.Various attempts have been effective in one dimension and weak in another.Utilizing a different method, a comprehensive assessment of a team-project-course is discussed in this paper.In this 15-week course, two midterms , a final exam, and weekly 15-minute quizzes and homework assignments were administered in addition to five team projects.The relationship between students' self-reported participation level in the team projects and their grade in the exams was analyzed to assess the effectiveness of team projects in this electrical power systems course.The results of the regression analysis suggest that there is a mild relationship between students' participation level in team projects and their final exam grades.According to Bloom's paper the learning pyramid (Figure 1) indicates that we start we evaluation and end with knowledge, we can argue that the development of projects in tandem with exams and quizzes, induces students to go through all the steps indicated in the pyramid, many times without realizing the learning involved during the process.The realization occurs at the final exam, when students perform better and learned a lot more.This point will be discussed later in this paper.