Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to provide input regarding the students’ perspectives on the assessment methods used in Higher Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education. Are traditional methods still effective? What are the students’ perspectives on the diverse evaluation methods in Higher Education? To answer these questions, the Educational Involvement Department of BEST (Board of European Students of Technology), a non-profit, non-governmental, non-political and non-representative student organization, organises BEST Symposia on Education, BSE (former Events on Education—EoEs), which aim to convene Higher Education stakeholders and raise the students’ engagement in Higher STEM Education. By performing a secondary data analysis of the students’ perspectives as they were expressed and recorded in EoE Gliwice (Manasova et al. in Be on the right track with SMART, learning - change the education of tomorrow!. Gliwice, 2016 [1]) and EoE Chania (Kloster Pedersen et al. in Refreshing education: update, rethink, grow. Chania, 2017 [2]) reports, the current study shows that laboratory settings are supportive for combining the three most preferred learning techniques: discussion groups, practicing by doing and teaching others/immediate use. Moreover, it was concluded that the assessment on every evaluation system should combine the students’ attitude in class and feedback from professors. Final exams no longer appeal to students and cannot reflect the knowledge and skill set obtained. Professors, universities and particularly educational policymakers should consider the students’ needs both when formulating a fair assessment system and creating/updating academic curricula.
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Notes
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Edglossary.org.: https://www.edglossary.org/assessment/.
- 2.
- 3.
For the TiT sessions the students were divided in four teams, each one representing a hypothetical institution with a given number of problems (six, in this case). The students were responsible to present improvement points, following brainstorming and debating practices.
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Antera, S., Costa, R., Kalfa, V., Mendes, P. (2019). Assessment in Higher STEM Education: The Now and the Future from the Students’ Perspective. In: Auer, M., Tsiatsos, T. (eds) The Challenges of the Digital Transformation in Education. ICL 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 917. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11935-5_73
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