ASSESSMENT OF COMPETENCY DEVELOPMENT IN A CHALLENGE BASED LEARNING COURSE: CAN COACHES BE OBJECTIVE ASSESSORS?

Higher education institutions aim to incorporate competency development into their
engineering curricula, which can help engineering students become independent
critical thinkers with entrepreneurial mindsets. However, no solid methods exist to
evaluate the acquisition of these competencies. Such assessments’ objectivities are
often ensured by distinguishing between who supervises a student group and who
grades its project. The assessor’s active involvement in the learning process is
essential for assessing competency development during the learning process, but such
involvement may lead to assessor bias. This study aims to investigate whether and
under what conditions coaches can be objective assessors. An intraclass correlation
coefficient (ICC) was used to measure the level of agreement between assessors and
coaches when using the same rubric to assess students’ deliverables. Four assessors
and seven coaches from the University of Twente assessed 24 students’ individual
learning processes based on individual reflection deliverables. The coaches assessed
the students they supervised during a challenge-based learning (CBL) course, while the assessors were without participating in the learning process assigned randomly to
students. The means were compared using SPSS, which indicated, among other
things, that coaches generally awarded higher scores than assessors. This may
indicate that coaches are biased because of their involvement in the learning process.
Despite this, the results also indicate that coach assessment was in line with assessors
when the coach was an appointed and experienced examiner.