Concept Inventories for Quality Assurance of Study Programs in Robotics
Robotics is gaining an importance among the subjects to be studied in scientific and engineering disciplines. However, being a quite new discipline with a high degree of inter- and trans-disciplinary aspects, the teaching community cannot rely on experien
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Abstract Robotics is gaining an importance among the subjects to be studied in scientific and engineering disciplines. However, being a quite new discipline with a high degree of inter- and trans-disciplinary aspects, the teaching community cannot rely on experience, gained by a long history of experiments. With this paper we propose means to help assess and improve study programs in robotics. The approach is based on the idea of concept inventories (CIs) and related tests to derive objective information for a comparison of student groups with each other and over time, e.g. to assess learning gain for specific measures. The approach helps to further establish quality assurance in the design of robotics study programs and equips teachers with measures for a formative assessment of their work.
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Keywords Robotics education Concept inventory Teaching assessment Learning assessment Quality assurance Accreditation
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1 Introduction Quality assurance as a dedicated task has been introduced to many universities with the Bologna process, targeted to harmonizing the European Higher Education Area. There are a number of organisations working on the definition of standards and guidelines. As a representative for others, [1] requests “Institutions should have a policy and associated procedures for the assurance of the quality and standards of their programmes …”. However, the requirements typically are not broken down to the operational level. Moreover, often, the quality assurance procedure is based on
R. Gerndt Ostfalia University, Wolfenbuettel, Germany e-mail: [email protected] J. Lüssem (✉) University of Applied Sciences Kiel, Kiel, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 M. Merdan et al. (eds.), Robotics in Education, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 457, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42975-5_25
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review by independent external agencies, either at the level of individual study programs or at system level. This introduces a subjective element to the process, which may result in a unification of programs and hamper development of individual fields of expertise and excellence. Whilst definition of standards is a commendable objective of these activities, they often lack sufficient objective components, e.g. a formative assessment of students and knowledge gain. Currently, quality assurance often is biased by personal experience of the, internal or external, auditors or members of advisory boards or by a given industrial or research community involved. However, this only insufficiently allows for a more agile reaction to new requirements by industry, service providers and academia. To overcome these limitations, new means of quality assurance for study programs should therefore include both, organisational processes and formative methods. The remaining part of this paper is organized as follows: After this introduction we will shortly revisit the organisational measures for quality assurance in higher education. Then we will a
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