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UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING TEAM PROJECTS: IS THERE ANY CORRELATION BETWEEN PRESENTATION AND PARTICIPATION?

Abstract

Oral presentations can be used to assess student performances in design projects. In a capstone course, students are required to complete a design project in two consecutive academic semesters. Each project generally involves more than two members. The final group report, presentation, and oral interview are the usual methods to evaluate each member’s contribution to the project. Since these tools sometimes do not suffice, peer assessment questionnaires have also been suggested by researchers to evaluate each student’s contribution to the project. The goal of this research was to evaluate each student’s participation in a team based project from the oral presentation performance. The result will provide an additional assessment tool for an instructor to effectively evaluate each student’s performance in a group. To accomplish this, team project data was collected from freshman and senior level courses from two universities’ undergraduate engineering program. In this research, both, an independent evaluator and peer evaluators evaluate each student’s performance during the group oral presentation. The Spearman's Rank Correlation method was used to determine whether there is a correlation between the team participation and group presentation in the project. For all group members, the result shows a strong correlation between oral presentation score and project participation grades.

1. Introduction

In the capstone based design projects, the student work together in teams to create solutions to design problems originating from four sources. In this study, the sources of the design projects were faculty projects, industry supported projects, projects for design competitions, and student initiated projects.1 Each team consisted of three to four students. Each team had a faculty advisor. The final grade for each student depended on the oral presentation, report, and peer assessment. Peer assessment questionnaires were made and explored by educators to evaluate each student contribution to the project2. Michaelsen et al.2 presented a peer assessment questionnaire to assess the team members’ participation level in the team based group project. Sanders et al.3 reported a statistical method of measuring the effectiveness of the interdisciplinary engineering capstone project using weekly and final oral presentation evaluations. The group project presentation is assessed by faculty and invited guests on knowledge gained, coordination, team participation, and leadership skills. Kuisma4 presents portfolio assessment techniques to assess an undergraduate group project in the Physiotherapy Program. This technique involves the students themselves reflecting on and evaluating their

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Khandaker, M., & Orono, P., & Ekwaro-Osire, S. (2008, June), Undergraduate Engineering Team Projects: Is There Any Correlation Between Presentation And Participation? Paper presented at 2008 Annual Conference & Exposition, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 10.18260/1-2--4134