Abstract:

The first steps of learning building structures uses to be especially difficult because students have to assimilate several number of structural concepts that are completely unfamiliar to them. In this way, the consolidated group for innovating in education E4 (Exploración de Enseñanzas en Estructuras de Edificación) planned experiences that incorporates exhaustive and continuous evaluation systems for learning in building structures.

The experience presented in this work has been carried out in two different student groups of the Structures 1 subject at the School of Architecture (Technical University of Madrid). The experience consists in incorporate a continuous evaluation system that every week allows the students to check the results of different structures problems. These weakly tests must be customized, assigning different values for each student. The purpose of personalizing is twofold: it is focused to minimize the possible student scam that could succeed if the same exercise is on-line resolved by students. On the other hand, it is a good learning to compare the different results obtained by some students in the face-to-face lessons in order to provide some valuable knowledge about the variation of the final results in comparison with the initial values of the structural problem.

It is well-known that exhaustive continuous evaluation methods, to make them viable, must be an automatic process. On the contrary, the correction process becomes unattainable for teachers. The process used in this work consists in an automatization of the checking process. Students have to introduce on-line the numerical values of the solutions (ten numerical values approximately) and they are automatically checked by an internal software. It is important to mention that this software is able to receive the results by a smartphone app.

Two conclusions are worthy of mention. First one is that exhaustive continuous evaluation used in this experience is an effective method for learning process and for evaluation procedure. The second one is that the automatic evaluation method presented in this paper is a powerful assessment tool that is able to automatically check several number of students tests in short order.

Keywords:

ICT, automatic evaluation, exhaustive evaluation.