The effect of online assessments and feedback practices on civil engineering students' learning

The move to online teaching and learning at higher institutions because of the Covid-19 pandemic in the year 2020 challenged engineering programs to change how they have been conducting their assessments. Before Covid, this process was done to check whether module outcomes are achieved and provide a grade for the student. Nowadays continuous assessments are used instead of summative assessments and civil engineering schools must now re-think the whole purpose of the assessment process. This paper reports on a study which was designed to find out if assessments given to engineering students are improving and enhancing their understanding and promote better learning. Our important goal as engineering lecturers is to prepare students for a professional life through assessment, teaching and learning. The study focused on the small number of students who study civil engineering technology at the University of Johannesburg. Assessment within the engineering discipline is ordinarily orientated towards illustrating competence in particular assignments utilizing only conventional or traditional assessment methods such as tests and exams. This work aimed to assist students to increase their learning potential from assessments and lecturers to provide constructive assessment feedback. The main research question was to find out the extent that students learn from assessment and feedback in the Theory of Structures module under civil engineering technology. The vehicles that were used to collect data includes lecture observations, questionnaires, and interviews. The research data collection was conducted over few weeks of the second semester with first year students doing Theory of Structures. Three types of data were collected from this study. The first was a semester test results and feedback. After the test, focus group interviews were conducted to students' feedback on the test process and they also gave details about how they found questions and solutions. The third instrument of data collection was the use of questionnaires in the form of online surveys. The analysis of data started by documenting the results obtained from the interviews, and online questionnaires. The audio recordings from interviews were transcribed using Otter software. The transcribed text was then merged with findings from questionnaires and analyzed using open coding by Quirkos software. The study showed that more work still needs to be done to educate students about the importance of assessment as the findings showed that there are students who still focus on grades during assessment and not real learning. Nowadays feedback is even more important since most students are using blended or online learning which requires support and guidance from the lecturer. Although the focus was on small size of sample or few participants compared to the faculty of engineering student population, the study still managed to provide findings that will be applied to improve assessment and feedback practices.