Establishing an Assessment Reporting System for Undergraduate Programs

Project Title

Establishing an Assessment Reporting System for Undergraduate Programs

Project Leader

Prof Mike So

School / Dept

SBM / ISOM

Project Duration

Jan 2009 - Feb 2013

Project Description

This is a program-level project that aims at developing a new assessment and reporting system for the new program - Risk Management and Business Intelligence (RMBI) - to understand individual students' strengths and weaknesses as well as to keep track how program intended learning outcomes achieved throughout the course study. The learning outcomes for the RMBI Program, including communication skills, integration of knowledge; teamwork and cooperation; creativity and critical thinking; and IT proficiency.

Project Outcome

A basic empirical analysis on the data collected from the assessment questionnaire was conducted. Particular focus is on critical thinking, the use of information and language skill. Some interesting findings were revealed from the analysis. They are:

1. The surveyed students on average wrote 3.5 pages for their English assignments per week. This may be insufficient for maintaining a high writing standard.
2. On average, the surveyed students met their instructors/ TAs once per month, indicating that students may not be very active in seeking academic advice.
3. Students were familiar with searching inforamtion for their assignments on the internet but not in the library. This may suggest that students overlook or underestimate the value of the library. The university may organize seminars or classes to let students know more about resources available in the library.

After the first-level analysis, statistical models linking the degree of the involvement of the students in various generic-skill learning activities in their daily life to different performance measures were obtained. Summary results are:

1. Taking committee position has dominant negative effect on the academic performance of the students.
2. Frequently using application software is not a sign of positive influence on the critical-thinking proficiency of the students. In fact, the effect from frequently using application software to critical-thinking proficiency is negative.
3. Critical-thinking proficiency is positively related to the frequency of searching information from different sources. Hence instructors may consider emphasizing and encouraging students to conduct more "critical" information search for their assignments.
4. Students in general pay inadequate effort in reading newspapers or discussing current controversial issues.

In the project, an assessment form was designed to let students know their generic skill competencies and to learn which areas they can improve. Sharing sessions were held to explain to students how to use and interpret the assessment form.

Structural equation models were developed to understand the relationship between students' learning behaviors and their generic skill proficiency.

Status

Completed

Project Documents
(Only accessible by HKUST users)

• Project Plan
• Progress Report: First | Second | Third |
• Final Report
• Project-end Review by Project Leader

Adaptation

Full Project