Electricity performance measurement of engineering students by a Rasch-based academic scale

Abstract

Due to the growing demand of skilled workers and the need of improving the quality of human resources, it is of utmost important that the current set of students are trained towards this global objective. Hence, it is empirical that these students acquire all the necessary skills including the basic knowledge that they need in order to make them competent workers. So, there is a need of a skill performance measurement method in identifying these capable engineers with strong basic skills among the graduates. One of the basic skills that they must have is competency in electrical circuits. Therefore, the aim of this study is to develop a Rasch performance measurement scale of the engineering students on their competency in basic electricity concepts. For this purpose, the Rasch Measurement Model was utilized to examine the items and persons reliability, the uni-dimensionality of the test and also the misfit items and persons. The test focuses on the six main domains of electricity which are "the meaning of parallel", "practical knowledge of current, voltage and resistance", "circuit connection" and "problem solving using mental models". The research was conducted on 102 Engineering students in a local university in Malaysia. Results revealed that these engineering students can be classified into six types of scale: excellent, capable, above average, average, weak and very weak. The application of this scale enables the identification of the competency in electricity skills among the engineering students, whom will be the future engineers.