Abstract
There is little doubt that student motivation is essential in providing a beneficial learning experience. One way to provide such motivation is to stimulate it through the most suitable methods of assessment. This paper shares the experience acquired by the authors - university lecturers in Civil Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid – both through their assessment methods and the feedback received via the Moodle platform. Over the last eight years the authors have introduced increasingly dynamic methods in their teaching and assessment, with highly satisfactory results being obtained. Over the last three academic years a test through co-assessment has been added and during the two an assessment exercise implemented through the Moodle platform. Each test has a weight of 5% of the final mark for the module. After sitting the respective Moodle test, the students filled in a questionnaire that sought their views not only on the teaching methods but also on how motivational they found such methods. As expected, the results showed that the students considered the internet-based Moodle platform to be useful. However, the most notable finding was that the majority felt that alternative teaching and assessment methods such as, among others, cooperative learning, were those that were most beneficial to their learning experience.
Highlights
According to constructivist epistemology, learning entails mental activity in which concepts are constructed and reconstructed through what may be termed a link-up of information through a highly complex process
There is little doubt that a module should involve some form of assessment, given that in the majority of cases students are more interested in the mark they obtain for an assignment or test than the learning it entails (Gibbs & Simpson, 2004)
This paper examines what the authors acquired from use of multiplechoice and true-false tests, the feedback from the questionnaires on the two tests, and student motivation in general
Summary
According to constructivist epistemology (or the study of knowledge acquisition), learning entails mental activity in which concepts are constructed and reconstructed through what may be termed a link-up of information through a highly complex process (von Glasersfeld, 1998). In such development, it is clear that motivation is paramount (Bravo, Amante-García, Simo, Enache & Fernandez, 2011; Omar, Jain & Noordin, 2013; Rodríguez-Largacha et al, 2015; Sun, 2014), something of which university lecturers will undoubtedly be aware. A priori this was not their objective
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