Colligate Assessments

Photo Credit: Luis Prado, from The Noun Project

Learning for learning sakes and engaging with the material is one of the biggest problems I see in university education. Students have been trained to chase the carrot on the sick reward of high-test scores, grades, and GPA. In the TED talk by Dan Pink on The Puzzle of Motivation, Dan Pink addresses the fact that rewards narrow focus but also restrict possibilities. Additionally, that incentives can lead to more negative impacts when it comes to

utilizing cognitive function and abilities. Thus, many cooperations have added paid work time where engineers can spend time working on projects that are outside their normal responsibilities. This has led to the generation of many great new ideas and fixes within the company. But why has this not been implemented more into our classrooms through implementing assessments that will lead to changes in the way students learn and engage with the material.

I think that a lot of these changes in assessment could come from evaluating student’s growth in subject matter over the semesters. Where students have a chance to improve old grades by retesting material that would improve past grades. Additionally, implementing clinical/problem-based learning where student-motivated topics are chosen could help add to the engagement between students and the material. This gives the students a chance to explore how the concepts they are learning relate to something they want to work on. This is especially important in engineering because we need to teach engineering how to approach problems and look for answers or new approaches and not just apply concepts to workbook pro

blems.

T

he key to generating a high-impact

classroom is changing the way we are assessing the students and motivating them.