COVID-19 Lockdown Effects on Student Grades of a University Engineering Course: A Psychometric Study

Abstract

Contribution: This article is centered on effects that the COVID-19 lockdown has produced on the student performance in specific engineering course. The study treats to evaluate if the changes in the teaching and student assessment have been suited. Background: Most of higher education courses have had to adapt to this situation and made quick changes in its teaching and evaluation. The course applied computing was not the exception and has to split into two blocks. Teaching and evaluation of the first block was given totally in-person with traditional methodology. On the other hand, the second block that was affected by the lockdown, was fully taught with online flipped classroom (FC) teaching and remote assessment. Research Questions: This has given the opportunity to analyze how these changes have affected the student performance and what benefits of incorporated online FC teaching have been produced in this course. Methodology: The reliability of tests and item analysis techniques have been employed to measure the consistency and the item difficulty of the performed tests, respectively. From this psychometric study, the quality of the methodology of student assessment can be established. The study is also applied to the previous year where the in-person traditional methodology was employed. Moreover, the effectiveness of the teaching methodology is analyzed with student surveys. Findings: The reliability of online student assessment for FC teaching is high, yet when compared with traditional assessment for this specific course in both analyzed years. The different level of item difficulty is constant in the first block, being a possible cause for the low reliability of the test. Moreover, student surveys and student performance suggest that the online FC teaching method can be suitable for this specific course, and can be applied in the future.