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Designing a Post Entry Language Assessment (PELA) in a First-year Engineering Course at a Canadian University
Grant program: Multilingual Classroom
Grant recipient: Michael Sjoerdsma, Engineering Science
Project team: Amanda Wallace, Centre for Educational Excellence (CEE) and Shan Guan, research assistant
Timeframe: March 2019 to March 2021
Funding: $5800
Course addressed: ENSC 100 – Engineering Technology & Society
Final report: View Michael Sjoerdsma's final report and findings (PDF)
Description: This course is required for all in-coming first-year students. ENSC 100 introduces students to the practice of engineering by surveying its history and its current state. It is closely connected to ENSC 105W which introduces the principles of effective communication with an emphasis on writing, research, presentations, and resumes. The two courses share teaching assistants, design labs, and some assignments with ENSC 105W providing support for the written and oral assignments in ENSC 100.
The intent of the work proposed in this grant is to create an instrument that will be used in the Fall 2019 offering of ENSC 100. We intend on applying for another ISTLD grant for the implementation phase. As we outline in this application, we will conduct pilot studies with former students from the Fall 2018 offering of ENSC 100, and, if possible, students enrolled in either offering of these courses at Fraser International College (FIC) in the Summer 2019 semester.
The outcome of this project has two intertwined goals: 1) assess students’ reading comprehension skills to allow the instructors to provide appropriate support for students identified as in need of additional assistance; 2) gather data required by our accreditation board.
Questions addressed:
- How well do students in the pilot understand what to do with the assessment tasks?
- Which of the two formats, open-ended or multiple-choice, best capture students’ reading comprehension?
- How consistently do different raters score students’ performance on the assessment
Knowledge sharing: We are currently working on a book chapter that discusses the need for and affordances of a PELA in an internationalizing university and the necessity of the university’s support to ensure its success.
Keywords: Engineering; post-entry language assessment (PELA); reading comprehension; first-year; academic literacies; communication skills; instrument design; multilingual students; English as an additional language (EAL)