N. P. Subheesh

Gender typecasts have prevailed in higher education since time immemorial. Previous research studies have demonstrated the incongruity in gender representation in almost every higher education sector, including engineering education. Gender-specific variation in perceptions towards engineering education and the engineering profession is a significant area of interest. However, relatively little research has been conducted on gender differences in school students' attitudes and perceptions of engineering. In addition, no such previous study has surveyed students of schools on the rural outskirts. The current study intends to address this research gap by investigating the insights of school students who participated in the ‘Rural Students' Technology Enhancement Program (R-STEP).’ R-STEP was a technical training program organised by the IEEE Education Society (EdSoc) Kerala Chapter exclusively for less-privileged school students from the rural outskirts of Kerala, a southern state of India. The research study critically analysed the R-STEP participants' responses to a questionnaire survey. The questionnaire was in the regional language, Malayalam, comprising five questions each on engineering education and profession. A total of 220 school students from various districts of Kerala participated in the survey. While 62.5% of female survey respondents indicated that they want to be engineers in the future, it was a more significant 86% in the case of males. Rather interestingly, 16.1% of female participants reported that they do not want to be engineers, compared to only 3.1% of males. This research-worthy fivefold difference between male and female attitudes is critically deliberated in the paper, along with other findings from the study. The paper concludes with a few recommendations to address rural school students' gender-specific attitudes towards engineering.

‘Assessment’ and ‘evaluation’ are two crucial components in engineering education settings. They play a significant role in the quality assurance of engineering education. Literature suggests that better assessment and evaluation practices require specific knowledge and skills about types and methods of assessment and evaluation. It is found that most of the engineering faculty members do not have factual knowledge about assessment and evaluation types and methods. Further, it is argued that engineering educators are not aware of ‘feedback comments’ associated with assessment practices. Comments on students’ performances are essential because it helps them know their course’s strengths and weaknesses. This chapter critically analyses assessment and evaluation practices in engineering education set up across the globe in this background. It discusses the challenges faced by engineering faculty members while assessing students’ performances. Lastly, the chapter offers recommendations to improve assessment and evaluation practices so that engineering students and teachers will primarily benefit.

Assessment of students’ learning performance is a pivotal but often neglected component in engineering education. Student assessment methodologies play a substantial role in the quality assurance of engineering education. Better assessment requires explicit knowledge of various types and methods of assessment. However, it is observed that most engineering educators do not possess factual knowledge about effective assessment methods and the underlying educational theories. Besides, it is argued that engineering educators are not well-informed about the formative feedback approaches associated with assessment for learning. Performer-friendly feedback on students’ achievements is indispensable since it aids students in recognising their strengths and weaknesses in learning. Hence, leveraging assessment methodologies can ascertain quality assurance in engineering education. If the integrity in student assessment is achieved tolerably well, the quality of the teaching-learning process will considerably improve. Effective assessment methods not only help students in their learning progress but also assist in enhancing the quality of teaching. Against this backdrop, this short-paper presents some practical recommendations for improving assessment methodologies and assuring quality in engineering education.

It is a well-written comprehensive article on the less explored area of engineering institution choices under Engineering Education Research (EER). Students' perceptions are critically analysed and the COVID-19 impacts on the same has been investigat...

The exceptional circumstance caused by the COVID-19 pandemic demands substantial modifications in the teaching-learning processes across the globe. Teachers and students are making use of online learning in virtual classrooms as an alternative for face-to-face learning in physical classrooms. However, students' attendance management during virtual learning is a challenging problem. It is quite difficult to identify students' disengagement and even to know whether they are in front of their smart devices or not. In this paper, we introduce the `Random Interval Attendance Management System' (RIAMS), which is an innovative solution for attendance monitoring issues, students' disengagement, and attendance faking during virtual learning. In RIAMS, we employed a face recognition module built using the Dlib open-source software library. In order to improve the efficiency of the system, we introduced two ancillary modalities - verifying students' responses to CAPTCHAs and UIN (Unique Identification Number) queries. Both the face recognition and ancillary modalities operate at random intervals of time. This distinctive feature of randomness in our design ensures that students' attention and engagement in virtual learning are enhanced. Furthermore, the RIAMS' multimodal architecture and its sub-modalities' adaptive weight system enable teachers to customize their attendance strategy for every course. The output analysis of each of the RIAMS modalities and the combined results emphasize the effectiveness and reliability of our system in the attendance management for virtual learning. The novel RIAMS model has the potential to be extensively deployed for virtual learning in post-COVID settings.

‘Assessment’ and ‘feedback’ are inherently embedded in a course curriculum of engineering education settings. These components are indispensable for the teaching-learning processes. It is observed that engineering faculty members do not require any ‘teacher-training’ to join the engineering institutions across the globe. Hence, they may not have adequate experience in assessing students’ performances and providing feedback to students. Only a few research studies have been carried out on assessment and feedback from the engineering education context. Therefore, this paper attempts to critically analyse the literature pertaining to learning through different types and methods of assessment practices in the engineering education settings. Further, it examines the significance of qualitative feedback in assessment and the principles of good feedback practice. It highlights the implications of assessing student performance and providing feedback from the engineering education perspective. Finally, the paper offers some recommendations on assessment and feedback practices in the engineering education settings.

‘Assessment’ and ‘feedback’ are inherently embedded in a course curriculum of engineering education settings. These components are indispensable for the teaching-learning processes. It is observed that engineering faculty members do not require any ‘teacher-training’ to join the...

‘Assessment’ and ‘evaluation’ are the integral parts of the engineering curriculum. These components have direct relevance to quality assurance in engineering education. Literature suggests that better assessment and evaluation practices require certain knowledge and skills about types and methods of assessment and evaluation. It is found that most of the engineering faculty members do not have concrete knowledge about ‘assessment’ and ‘evaluation’ types and methods. Further, it is argued that engineering educators are not well aware of ‘feedback comments’ that are associated with assessment practices. Comments on students’ performances are essential because it helps them to know their strengths and weaknesses of a course. In this background, the paper critically analyses assessment and evaluation practices in engineering education setup across the globe. In particular, it discusses the challenges faced by engineering faculty members while assessing students’ performances. Finally, the paper offers suggestions to improve assessment and evaluation practices so that students doing engineering programs will be largely benefited.

With the rapid development of technology, incorporation of Information Communication Technology (ICT) for formative assessment purpose has been increasing over the past decade. This article describes the design and development of identification of students' misconceptions in an individualized learning environment (iSMILE) system that includes accommodations for students’ misconceptions in order to improve student’s conceptual understanding and finally learning outcome. The assessment process is carried out by preparing two-level multiple-choice questions. Misconceptions are identified for each instructional objective to make a root question and linked questions. Depending on the answers provided by the student in first level, the linked questions are given to get more information regarding the misconception. Based on the first and second level answers of students, feedbacks are provided with the misconception identified. One of the most important differences of our iSMILE system, with respect to the other developed systems, is the inclusion of misconception based feedback. The iSMILE system has been developed by using open source ICT tools (like MySQL, Apache, etc.) which make the system free of cost and accessible and editable by any instructor from anywhere and at any time.