Measuring the Impact of Using Daily Objectives to Provide Rapid Feedback in Construction Courses

ABSTRACT

In order to develop a systematic way to determine when students would benefit from additional in-class examples, a prior study presented the case study of using daily learning objectives as a rapid feedback system. This study presents a measurement of the impact of using these daily objectives as a rapid feedback system for construction science courses. The five separate courses implementing the system cover a breadth of construction topics providing a thorough investigation of construction education and the impact of the daily objective rapid feedback approach. The courses investigated were Structural Analysis, Construction Estimating, Construction Project Management, Understanding the Concrete Construction System, and Industrial Management and Scheduling. The assessment tools used to determine the impact of the system include pre and post questionnaires, and student grades with a comparison to offerings of each course in which the daily objective system was not implemented. Within the questionnaires there were general questions probing an individual student’s learning preference and questions to determine if the students’ valued the daily objective format. Comparison of student performance indicated no statistically significant changes, although there are some positive trends. The most significant result is that the students overwhelmingly believe that the system is useful to them.

KEYWORDS:

• construction education
• instructional technology
• formative assessment
• curriculum development

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Mallory Frazier, Austin Talley, and Kelli Watson for their assistance with data compilation.