The Assessment of Student Teamwork to Promote CDIO Learning Objectives

École Polytechnique Montreal is currently completing its reform of the Mechanical Engineering curriculum according to the CDIO principles. In each year of this new undergraduate syllabus, students participate in a design project, which aims to gradually build the participants’ practical experience in a collaborative product development context. In order to measure the academic and professional skills acquired during this project-based training process, a number of evaluation methods were customized in order to improve teamwork assessment.

Besides the standard evaluation methods, the peer assessment system, the logbook assessment techniques, and the team mentoring approach are of particular interest. Peer assessment tools have been developed over the years to help students give feedback and qualify the contributions of other team members. The goal of these peer review evaluations is to build the ability of students to constructively comment on their performance. The introduction of student logbook evaluations further personalizes individual assessments in a project context. This initiative provides a unique insight on a student's progression, critical thinking capacities and his contribution to the project team effort.

Finally, the team mentoring approach helps student teams to focus on the progress of the project and teachers to acquire a general view of the work achieved by the different teams. This paper will hence detail these progressive teamwork evaluation methods and then present elements of feedback from the various actors involved and also identify possible improvements to these new assessment methods.