Session: DEC-01-02-Implementation and Assessment Best Paper

Paper Number: 88161

88161 - Evaluation of Students' Learning Through Reflection on Doing Based on Sentiment Analysis 

In this paper we address the following question:

How can instructors leverage assessment instruments in design, build, and test courses to simultaneously improve student outcomes and assess student learning well enough to improve courses for future students?

A Take-away is an unstructured sentence, written by students in AME4163: Principles of Engineering Design, the University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA, to record what they understand by reflecting on an authentic and immersive experiences throughout the semester. The immersive experiences include lectures, assignments, reviews, building, testing, and a post-analysis for the design of an electro-mechanical system to address a given customer need. In the context of a Take-away, a student then writes a Learning Statement which is a structured sentence written as a triple, i.e., [Experience – Learning - Value]. In 2019-2021, we collected about 30,000 Take-aways and Learning Statements from almost 400 students. In our earlier papers, we concentrated on analyzing these sentences by a text mining framework and extracting their topics by Topic Model to assess how student learning meets the instructors’ expectations embodied in the course booklet.

In this paper, we consider this question from the perspective of students’ feelings and use dictionary-based sentiment analysis to evaluate students’ subjective feelings toward what they are learning. Through the quantitative results, we give evidence-based guidance to the instructors on improving the course. Meanwhile, this method is general and can be applied in other scenarios.

 

Presenting Author: Yupeng Wu Beijing Institute of Technology

Presenting Author Biography: Yupeng Wu is an undergradaute student at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

Authors:

Yupeng Wu Beijing Institute of Technology
Zhenjun Ming Beijing Institute of Technology
Janet K. Allen Univ of Oklahoma
Farrokh Mistree University of Oklahoma