Improving Student Participation in Oral Presentation of a Project-Based Engineering Design Course in a Large-Class Setting

Abstract

Arranging oral presentations has always been very difficult and ineffective in our large project-based engineering design class of about 110 students each year. This paper presents a scheme of implementing peer evaluation to improve students’ participation and learning outcome in the oral presentation sessions. Basically, students were asked to grade and comment on oral presentations by other students in a pre-defined manner. The effect of oral presentations with/without the intervention of peer evaluation was compared. Our data and questionnaire results showed, with careful design of the format, peer evaluation indeed improved students’ participation in oral presentations, naturally leading to more serious and positive learning attitude, and eventually a better learning outcome.