Nadine Adams

Strategies to Remove Barriers and Increase Motivation to Use the Tablet PC in Formative Assessment

Background: The Tablet PC has been employed to provide feedback through formative assessment to students in preparatory mathematics courses at Central Queensland University for close to a decade. A study conducted in 2011 on formative assessment and feedback given via the Tablet PC within these courses conveyed extremely positive outcomes (Adams, Dekkers and Elliott, 2012). Approximately 90% of the 140 students surveyed found the feedback beneficial to their learning and that assessment was returned, on average, within two to four days . These findings would indicate that these methods should be adopted into mainstream higher education courses (Adams, Dekkers and Elliott, 2012). Purpose: This paper investigates how engineering academics can be encouraged to integrate the use of the Tablet PC to improve student understanding of course content through formative assessment feedback. In particular it looks at the barriers and motivators for using the Tablet PC. Design/Method: Building on the research and experiences of staff involved in the use of the Tablet PC to provide feedback on formative assessment in preparatory mathematics courses, strategies are to be developed to implement and improve these practices in undergraduate engineering courses. Using a grounded theory methodology, the research team have a two stage process. Stage one which is reported on in this paper uses the observations of the team to identify the barriers and motivators. Results: Based on the results obtained from studies conducted on the utilisation of Tablet PCs in preparatory mathematics courses, incorporation of the technology into engineering undergraduate courses would appear to benefit students. Stage one identifies the motivators and barriers and how these impact the uptake of the Tablet PC within the engineering school of Central Queensland University. Conclusions: The Tablet PC is both an innovative and adaptive form of technology which is able to support the teaching and learning process. Through the recognition of the observed positives and negatives of Tablet PC application in other courses strategies will be implemented that remove the recognised barriers and provide benefits thus encouraging engineering academics to use the Tablet PC to provide feedback on formative assessment.

Investigating the Relationship Between Student Characteristics and Progression: An Archive Study

Progression has been seen as an indicator of a student’s academic development. Different students usually have different characteristics affecting student progression. The objective of this study is to examine the relationship between students’ characteristics and progression. To achieve this objective, an archive study was performed to check 1547 Built Environment student records at Central Queensland University (CQUniversity). The student management data archive included all the students studying Built Environment programs at CQUniversity from the start of Term 1 2000 to the end of Term 3 2010. The Student Progression Unit (SPU) was used to measure the students’ progression. The analysis results indicated that the students with academic credit transfers performed better in terms of SPU than those without, and that the students who were in Building Surveying program received significantly higher SPU scores than those in other programs. In addition, the students’ gender, geographical location, socioeconomic status, and countries of birth did not significantly affect their SPUs. This study provides an in-depth understanding of the relationship between student characteristics and progression.