Continuous assessment in a large first-year engineering mechanics course: the effect of participation and performance in compulsory and voluntary assessments on final grades

This paper presents a study on continuous assessment (CA) in a first-year engineering course at a South African University. CA is widely used to encourage active learning and keep students up to date with work. The use of CA has largely been shown to result in an improvement in student performance when compared to the use of final examinations only. This study showed that performance in low-stakes, formative automatically assessed online quizzes had a moderate positive correlation with the semester grade, and weak positive correlation with overall final results. This indicates that the assessments are performing well in keeping students up to date with work, and thus preparing them for higher stakes, summative assessments. The ability to use CA results to flag students early in the semester with a medium to high-risk of not achieving exam entrance or failing the module was noted. Students that participated in additional voluntary CA activities showed a significant improvement in success in the module. Student perceptions identified the CA quizzes as overall the most beneficial activity to improving performance; comments on reasons for this align to the instructive nature of this assessment technique.