A Text Analytics Evaluation of a First-Year Engineering Project-Based Unit

View/ Open
File version
Version of Record (VoR)
Author(s)
Palmer, S
Hall, W
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2016
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
In the undergraduate engineering program at Griffith University in Australia, the unit 1006ENG Design and Professional
Skills aims to provide an introduction to engineering design and professional practice through a project-based learning
(PBL) approach to problem solving. It provides students with an experience of PBL in the first-year of their programme.
The unit comprises an underpinning lecture series, design work including group project activities, an individual computeraided
drawing exercise/s and an oral presentation. Griffith University employs a ‘Student Experience of Course’ (SEC) online
survey as part of its student ...
View more >In the undergraduate engineering program at Griffith University in Australia, the unit 1006ENG Design and Professional Skills aims to provide an introduction to engineering design and professional practice through a project-based learning (PBL) approach to problem solving. It provides students with an experience of PBL in the first-year of their programme. The unit comprises an underpinning lecture series, design work including group project activities, an individual computeraided drawing exercise/s and an oral presentation. Griffith University employs a ‘Student Experience of Course’ (SEC) online survey as part of its student evaluation of teaching, quality improvement and staff performance management processes. As well as numerical response scale items, it includes the following two questions inviting open-ended text responses from students: i) What did you find particularly good about this course? and ii) How could this course be improved? The collection of textual data in in student surveys is commonplace, due to the rich descriptions of respondent experiences they can provide at relatively low cost. However, historically these data have been underutilised because they are time consuming to analyse manually, and there has been a lack of automated tools to exploit such data efficiently. Text analytics approaches offer analysis methods that result in visual representations of comment data that highlight key individual themes in these data and the relationships between those themes. We present a text analytics-based evaluation of the SEC open-ended comments received in the first two years of offer of the PBL unit 1006ENG. We discuss the results obtained in detail. The method developed and documented here is a practical and useful approach to analysing/visualising openended comment data that could be applied by others with similar comment data sets.
View less >
View more >In the undergraduate engineering program at Griffith University in Australia, the unit 1006ENG Design and Professional Skills aims to provide an introduction to engineering design and professional practice through a project-based learning (PBL) approach to problem solving. It provides students with an experience of PBL in the first-year of their programme. The unit comprises an underpinning lecture series, design work including group project activities, an individual computeraided drawing exercise/s and an oral presentation. Griffith University employs a ‘Student Experience of Course’ (SEC) online survey as part of its student evaluation of teaching, quality improvement and staff performance management processes. As well as numerical response scale items, it includes the following two questions inviting open-ended text responses from students: i) What did you find particularly good about this course? and ii) How could this course be improved? The collection of textual data in in student surveys is commonplace, due to the rich descriptions of respondent experiences they can provide at relatively low cost. However, historically these data have been underutilised because they are time consuming to analyse manually, and there has been a lack of automated tools to exploit such data efficiently. Text analytics approaches offer analysis methods that result in visual representations of comment data that highlight key individual themes in these data and the relationships between those themes. We present a text analytics-based evaluation of the SEC open-ended comments received in the first two years of offer of the PBL unit 1006ENG. We discuss the results obtained in detail. The method developed and documented here is a practical and useful approach to analysing/visualising openended comment data that could be applied by others with similar comment data sets.
View less >
Conference Title
International Symposium on Project Approaches in Engineering Education
Volume
6
Publisher URI
Copyright Statement
© 2016 Pennsylvania Association of Environmental Educators. The attached file is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the conference's website for access to the definitive, published version.
Subject
Other education not elsewhere classified