Rubrics for assessing oral communication in the capstone design experience: development, application, analysis and refinement

• Autores: H. Welch, D. Suri, E. Durant
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 25, no. Extra 5, 2009, págs. 952-961
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The importance of good communication skills is becoming increasingly relevant to engineers in today's globally competitive environment. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), recognizing this phenomenon, introduced six professional skills along with the various hard skills in their new accreditation criteria EC2000 for all engineering programs. At the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), rubrics were developed to aid in assessing the oral presentations made during the capstone senior design sequence. These rubrics have been applied by various senior design professors each quarter to assess all the mid-quarter presentations. The analysis (using the Spearman Rank Correlation Test and a Rater Disagreement Metric) of data collected over four quarters indicates that by repeatedly applying, analyzing and refining a rubric, it is possible to minimize the often subjective means of evaluating communication skills and move towards more objective evaluations. Over the past three years, multiple evaluators have shown strong agreement in the quality of student presentations. However, they have not yet arrived at a complete consensus indicating that we as yet do not have a completely reliable and objective tool and more work needs to be done in this area.