Exclusion from constructive alignment unmasked by emergency teaching

Abstract

CONTEXT The research study was conducted at a contact-based, research-intensive university in South Africa, where the faculty of engineering has adopted a feedback-feedforward approach to improving engineering pedagogy through theoretically-supported, interdisciplinary and community-of-practice approaches. The outcomes-based curricula are designed to explicitly align teaching/learning activities, the intended learning outcomes and assessment tasks. The Covid-19 emergency remote teaching (ERT) phase has raised the question of the disjuncture between student perceptions and assessment performance during independent, remote learning. PURPOSE OR GOAL A faculty-wide research initiative to determine how undergraduate engineering students were experiencing ERT revealed significant systemic challenges and heightened academic stress. Of particular concern in 2021 is the 2nd year cohort, whose entire 1st year was under ERT conditions. Poor first term assessment performance suggested the need to investigate not only how students were studying, but their perceptions of their practices and efforts in relation to their perceptions of course requirements, and consequently their performance. APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS A mixed-method survey-based approach was used to assess second year students’ perceptions of a design-based module. The surveys were sent out when it became clear that performance was going to be substantially poorer than expected for their first in-person and closed-book assessment after ERT. The samples were taken after the assessment, after the model answers lecture, after the marks were published, and again after an intervention. The 2020 marks were compared with the last in-person assessments from 2019. Out of the 280 students, 142 responded to the survey. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES Students overestimated their marks after writing, even after seeing the model answers. Two thirds reported the paper as difficult, which reduced to 58% after the model answers, and 74% after releasing the marks. Two thirds said online lectures prepared them sufficiently, but after the marks only 45% did. After a reflection-in-action intervention, 81% considered them sufficient and the error in estimated marks for the next assessment reduced by 41%. Despite 97% engagement with the lectures and 96% claiming to have done the tutorials and practicals on their own, only 38% used the Q&A forums, and not a single student made an appointment with the lecturer. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY While constructive alignment is a common pedagogical approach, it does not explicitly include alignment to student abilities or perceptions. In contact-based, socio-culturally mediated contexts, educators may tacitly be responsive to (mis)conceptions to enhance alignment between student abilities, expectations and intended course outcomes. We suggest, in this paper, that a constructive alignment model needs to include methods to overcome self-efficacy gaps, given that we need to produce critically-thinking, confident, and capable graduates.