Research in progress : assessing individual student learning within team-based engineering curricula

The assessment of individual students’ learning in team-based courses can be problematic for academic staff and students alike. Qualitative approaches used in this setting may also be seen as lacking validity by those who consider only quantitative assessment approaches to be viable. This five-institution research project is designed to gather data from academic staff and students about their experiences with assessment in team-based settings with the goal of deriving assessment practices that are fair to students and yield data that can guide program development and accreditation processes. This paper reports on the research design, efforts to date, and future directions.