Making Grades Meaningful - Standards-Based Grading for Engineering Project Courses

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This Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project will help improve the process through which student progress in engineering courses is measured and evaluated. The project will investigate the use of standards-based grading in undergraduate engineering project courses. Standards-based grading directly measures the quality of students' development towards achieving well-defined course objectives. This approach addresses the need in higher education to assess actual student learning relative to specific rigorous competencies. This collaborative project will bring together faculty at a diverse set of institutions: Arizona State University, Elizabethtown College, Loyola Marymount University, and Purdue University to engage a community of undergraduate engineering faculty teaching project courses as a focused first effort to implement standards-based grading in the undergraduate engineering curriculum. Standards-based grading has been implemented in K-12 learning environments but no formal studies have been conducted to date that evaluate this grading system in higher education. To address this gap, the goals of this educational research effort are to: formally establish the structure and components of a standards-based grading system for engineering project courses; assess the effects of standards-based grading in engineering project courses; and establish a collaborative network of scholars committed to implementing and advancing standards-based grading within engineering education. This project is based on exploratory results of a series of pilot studies implementing standards-based grading in engineering courses that found improvement in both affective and cognitive student behaviors. This project will use qualitative and quantitative methods to build on the foundation established in the pilot studies. Faculty and students will provide insights into the impact that standards-based grading has on associated value, engineering design self-efficacy, and academic achievement. This work will provide information about how a standards-based alternative to traditional score-based grading can improve undergraduate engineering education. The project includes efforts to communicate the results of this work to the broader STEM education community.