Capturing student´s teamwork and open-ended design performance in an undergraduate multimedia engineering design class

The present work describes the authors experiences capturing student performance in the freshman design class ME39C: Multimedia Case Studies of Engineering Design, at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. The focus of the ME39C class is to facilitate students as they work in teams to develop an original web based multimedia case study of an engineering design. The paper emphasizes a qualitative approach to capturing student performance and focuses on the process of teamwork and the interaction among students. They used a series of different methods to triangulate, compare and evaluate student performance. Specifically, they used an original web-based discussion tool, student observations and interviews, and questionnaires. Initial findings revealed that information obtained by one method sometimes contradicted data obtained from another. These contradictions suggest caution when analyzing student performance based on just one point of view. The data also indicates that team work, both in terms of product and process, can and should be collected continuously throughout the semester in order to provide the necessary feedback essential to student learning and improvement. Using a variety of assessment techniques affords a more comprehensive analysis of student performance.