Project Objectives:
The primary objective of the Engineering Online Gateway System (EOGS) is to enhance student learning in an introductory programming course, a course that many students find to be difficult during their first year of study. The EOGS allows the course instructor to establish a baseline level of comprehension that each student must attain before each midterm exam in the course. More specifically, the EOGS requires the student to demonstrate his/her knowledge of the material through an automated system by which the student is asked a battery of programming-related questions. The student must then respond to these questions using actual lines of computer-programming instructions which are graded in real-time. This process continues until the student has achieved a minimum-desired score on this gateway exam.
Project Achievements:
The Engineering Online Gateway System (EOGS) is a novel approach to assessing student learning in a programming-related course. A major deliverable from this project is the actual infrastructure that drives the EOGS. More specifically, the EOGS “lives” in a web-based environment which integrates the ease of using a website with the power of real-time programming code compilation, as well as evaluation. Over the past year, this system has been further refined to include a statistics module that allows the instructor to determine how well students (as a whole) are performing on the gateway exam, which can then be used to further refine the gateway exam as it is taking place. In addition to the actual infrastructure, we have successfully applied this gateway exam to four (4) semesters of an introductory programming course (ENGR 101) at the University of Michigan. Approximately 1,200 undergraduate students participated in the online exam, which allowed us to collect a significant data sample size to determine the effectiveness of the EOGS. We encourage the reader to view our publication on the EOGS, as mentioned in the “Dissemination” section of this report.
Continuation:
The Engineering Online Gateway System (EOGS) has received positive reviews from the course staff for the introductory programming courses at the University of Michigan, College of Engineering. Furthermore, based on feedback obtained from fellow researchers in the Engineering Education field at a recent American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) conference, we believe that the EOGS has significant future potential and thus the work on this system will continue. Not only will EOGS continue to be used in the ENGR 101 course at the University of Michigan, but we have developed an elementary version of a performance prediction framework whereby we study a student’s potential performance. More specifically, we seek to predict a student’s performance in a computer programming course, prior the first day of class, using specifically-designed questions and the EOGS system to perform this evaluation.
Dissemination:
The Engineering Online Gateway System (EOGS) has received significant attention at the University of Michigan and from within the Engineering Education community. The EOGS was initially launched at the University of Michigan, College of Engineering. Dissemination initially occurred at a Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) poster fair at the University of Michigan. In addition, the EOGS has been highlighted at the annual conference of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) in Louisville, Kentucky in 2010. Finally, the results of our study have been published in the Journal on Computers in Education. The complete reference is noted below:M. Lapp, J. Ringenberg, and T. J. Fleszar, “Engineering Online Gateway System Ensuring and evaluating student learning through automated, milestone exams”, Computers in Education Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, January – March 2011, pp. 77 – 83.
Advice to your Colleagues:
The physical infrastructure of the Engineering Online Gateway System (EOGS) was created with the help of a number of undergraduate research assistants as part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunity (UROP) program at the University of Michigan. Without their help, the EOGS would not be the system it is today and we would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the significant contributions and value that undergraduate research assistants can bring to a project. We would also like to encourage others to make use of UROP as it is an important program for introducing undergraduate students to research and it also provides an excellent resource for furthering the success of many different projects.
