(445e) Teaching Process Calculations to Undergraduate Chemical Engineers: Changing the Evaluations Paradigm

Process Calculations, or Principles and Calculations in Chemical Engineering, is a required first year Chemical Engineering undergraduate course. Class sizes at all major universities tend to be large, and as it is a first foray into the field for the students, gaining conceptual clarity and understanding problem solving methodologies is a challenge. Furthermore, the voluminous amount of data required for solving problems, and the myriad sources of such data that have to accessed and chosen with careful discrimination, are problems faced by students.

As instructors, evaluations pose big hurdles. With large classes, and a just-out-of-high-school mentality of students (which means that they struggle to accept the open-ended nature of most engineering problems), crafting intelligent exams that enhance learning is difficult. In this paper, we propose a way of integrating different types of exams & evaluations into the design of the course. We highlight a means for using games (simple, easy to create ones) as both learning and evaluation tools in the semester-long course.

Overall, the purpose of a core course like Process Calculations is to provide students with significant advancement in their learning, so that they access the further courses in the semester comfortably and with enthusiasm. But as instructors the human aspects of managing student stress and ensuring that the evaluations are meaningful and a natural extension of classes, is important.

Philosophy of Evaluation Scheme

In our design of the course, we wanted to think of exams and evaluations as additional opportunities for student learning, and not merely a demonstration of the knowledge gained during the classes. Moreover, we also operated under the assumption that effort and accuracy are both important and students deserve marks (or points) , which count towards the final grade, for putting in measurable effort, as well as for getting to the correct answer. Finally, we wanted the evaluations to be fun (as possible).

Administrative and other Constraints

In our system, there is a requirement that core courses follow a common pattern of exams. Principally, they need to involve a “Big Final” which contributes at least 40% of the final marks leading to a grade. It is highly recommended that there are at least two other in-person, proctored exams (called quizzes) spread evenly across the semester. Within these, significant freedom is provided to instructors to plan the semester, as long as the plan is known to the students well in advance, preferably at the beginning of the term. The oversight is from a committee consisting of handful of other faculty from the department – student representatives are given the chance to articulate the concerns of the class during the meeting with the committee (held twice in the semester). A relative grading pattern is typical in our core courses.

Proposed Activities of Evaluation

Keeping within the spirit of the requirements at IIT Madras, we used a scheme of evaluation that involved the activities shown in Figure 1. The combination of these diverse means of evaluation provide the opportunity to implement the three ideological principles we set out for ourselves (focus on learning; reward effort; have fun), all the while meeting the administrative needs.

Of these, a part of the Big Final and one of the in-semester Quizzes were done in the conventional/traditional mode (but were always open book). All the other parts of the evaluation were specially designed so as to reward student effort significantly. Of course the games that were used in the class and for the evaluations, added a fun element (though they are also competitive in a way, with time pressure and so on).

During the semester, we developed a number of games that were particularly enjoyed by the students. One class of games was just to help students learn the course material better, and avoid having to memorise terms in a rote manner. For e.g. we designed a simple game on https://wordwall.net/, to identify the different parts of a flow chart by dragging and dropping pins. Readers can attempt to play this game here: https://wordwall.net/resource/28995785

We used anagrams, crosswords, match the following and several other simple motifs – students played these at their own time/pace and typically went back again to make sure they got all answers right. The other kind of games involved time pressure and were of the multiple choice kind, on platforms like kahoot! (https://kahoot.com/) or quizzizz (https://quizizz.com/admin). These were played in class, with lot of noise (including background music!) and a competitive spirit among students (a leader board was displayed after each question). The back-end reports were used for individual grading.

Of the other elements that we used in evaluation, one requires particular mention –the reflections form that students filled every week. We used an online forum for this, and the feedback was meant to be non-anonymous (parenthetically, we collected a lot of quick anonymous feedback via polling softwares like slido and mentimeter, in class, this was useful but in a different way). The reflection forms were opportunities for students to briefly talk about their learning during the week, mention their favourite topic and raise any concerns they had. Every student who filled a form was awarded a point towards the final grade. This is a type of evaluation where effort is rewarded, with no further analysis of accuracy. We found this useful – we obtained the feedback we needed, students felt enthusiastic about writing to us, and it helped in managing stress levels.

Conclusions

In recent years, we have shaken ourselves out of the long-held belief that a noisy classroom is bad - students are not paying attention the teacher and are not learning. We embraced collaboration and high decibel levels in our classroom, spent time providing students with many activities that they enjoyed (far more than our lectures, perhaps), and stood evaluation on its head. Yes, this made our classes very loud at times but there were giggles and smiles, and the student testimonials at the end, were nothing but encouraging. In terms of the performance of the students, the class average marks and the distribution of grades were well within reason. We have also made a big push to use technology appropriately in the classroom, to enable us to engage with students better. For the conventional exam components of the course, we are now working with partners to provide AI-enabled unique exam papers with auto-grading possibility, for each student. This will be experimented on later this semester. In this presentation, we look forward to illustrating our methods and discussing ways in which chemical engineering faculty can leverage them, particularly in large, core course classes.