Evaluation practices of learning outcomes that promote culture of continual quality improvement

Abstract

Engineering schools and faculties in Malaysia normally adopt analytical tools to assess students’ attainment of program outcomes. These tools are often sophisticated and emphasized only on the tabulation and display of data. The process stops short in promoting meaningful continual quality improvement actions for their programs. Literature review revealed that schools and faculties often failed to perform a meaningful analysis of students’ outcomes and presented ambiguous plans on the utilization of data for continual quality improvement. In this study, the authors would demonstrate some practices in the measurement and evaluation of outcomes, which results in effective continual quality improvement actions with sustainable efforts from program owners. Analysis and discussion were carried out on the documents related to quality improvement from two higher learning institutions complemented with an analytical tool known as Engineering Outcome Analytics developed by Tunku Abdul Rahman University College. It was demonstrated that an effective outcomes-based education measurement system focuses on practicality where educators are more readily to expend efforts on assessment and evaluation of outcomes, creating a culture of continual quality improvement (CQI) rather than having a sophisticated measurement system that requires enormous data entries. The study is expected to benefit engineering educators and program owners in designing or improving their existing analytical tools to address the continual quality improvement requirements stipulated by the Engineering Accreditation Council (EAC) by highlighting the shortcomings that can be avoided and best practices that can be adopted.