Development of dynamic OBE model to quantify student performance

Abstract

AbstractOutcome‐based education (OBE) is widely adopted in engineering programs worldwide. However, the conventional methods often involve arbitrary procedures requiring lecturers to assume initial values in defining the OBE matrices. This may lead to the mismatch between the students' program outcomes (PO) attainment with the stakeholders' expectations. Thus, a dynamic OBE model by explicitly incorporating the assessment marks into the OBE matrices is introduced and verified quantitatively and qualitatively. Network models were used to visualize the connections between the assessment tools with specific CO and PO to demonstrate how the OBE is measured and improved. The qualitative data from the surveys involved year one chemical engineering students aged between 20 and 22, who attended both Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamic courses in the particular semester. These subjects measured PO, namely engineering knowledge and problem analysis, which are fundamental to an engineering program. The quantitative data were compared to verify the hypotheses with a reference scheme defined to measure the success rate. The results reveal a 67% success rate in matching the lecturer ratings on the same PO measured from student performance. The correlation comparisons showed that the dynamic OBE model attained higher accuracy, indicating that the PO scores aligned closely with actual student performances. The comparison on matching the respective PO scores between the two courses shows a poor success rate of 44%, indicating that the student performances on PO are not equally the same. The dynamic OBE model has effectively measured the PO from the hypotheses on stakeholders' perspectives.