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Classroom tests are a common and default form of assessments in concept-heavy, fundamental engineering courses. Tests have benefits to learning, such as the testing effect that helps with the retrieval of knowledge, but there are also disadvantages, like discouraging deep learning approaches and decreasing motivation to learn, that warrant examining and questioning why tests are common, which engineering education literature lacks. Furthermore, the advancement of assessment research has led to alternative assessments that can diversify types of assessments and promote intentionality in test usage in these courses, supporting the need for scholarship on understanding test usage. My research began to address this by studying fundamental engineering course instructors' test beliefs and behaviors because engineering instructors have shown to have autonomy in making course decisions and barriers to adopting scholarship-based assessment practices among these engineering instructors persist. This dissertation study, grounded in the Situated Expectancy Value Theory (SEVT), explored, uncovered, and articulated seven fundamental engineering course instructors' test beliefs and behaviors from mechanical engineering and engineering science departments in a public, land-grant, Research 1 institution. Leveraging the case study research methodology from a pragmatic perspective, my multi-case study, with each participant being defined as a case, answered an overarching research question and five sub-research questions that yielded findings on five test aspects: test usage, design, administration, cheating, and fairness. Eight collected data sources in the form of qualitative interviews, course, department, and institution documents became the database to answer the questions. Analyses of these data involved coding and content analysis, and subsequent thematic analysis. The outcome of these analyses shaped the individual case profiles for cross-case analysis to understand belief and behavior patterns at a higher level. My research has found three groups of test usage beliefs. These are enthusiastic test users, default test users, and skeptical test users. All participants featured tests heavily in their courses and justified with learning outcomes and some non-course-content factors like large class sizes for grading conveniences. However, those in default and skeptical test user groups also acknowledged some non-course-content factors, like inertia and peer pressure, that influenced their test usage beliefs and behaviors. All participants acknowledged some disadvantages with tests, but those who are skeptical with test usage presented stronger beliefs about test disadvantages, arguing for the need to move away from tests when necessary. Some participants also presented conflicting beliefs and behaviors regarding their test usage. My study has also found all participants using problem-solving questions, emphasizing the need to curb cheating especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, preferring in-person test administration, and defining test fairness with reasonable completion time and adequate content coverage. These findings contribute to addressing identified research gaps in the literature and have implications for future research on tests with assessment philosophies, classroom practices on diversifying assessments and intentional test usage, and future research on possible assessment roles in addressing systemic inequity in engineering. / Doctor of Philosophy / Tests or exams like quizzes, midterms, and finals are common for measuring student learning in foundational engineering courses that focus on teaching the core engineering concepts for problem-solving. There are benefits to tests, like helping students remember the concepts for future use. However, tests also have problems like getting to students focus more on memorizing and matching patterns, provoking student test anxiety, and demotivating students from learning. Engineering education research, surprisingly, does not explore much on why tests are common, considering said problems. My dissertation tackled this issue by studying the test usage beliefs and behaviors of seven foundational course instructors from mechanical engineering and engineering science departments. The focus was on the instructors because engineering instructors tend to have autonomy in making course decisions and many instructors are resistant to changing their teaching practices. Understanding their beliefs and behaviors can help with research and efforts to promote better practices, like diversifying the types of assessment used and being more intentional when using tests. My results show three groups separating the participants on their beliefs about using tests. One participant was very enthusiastic about using tests and believed that tests were the only good way to assess learning. Four participants were default test users as they acknowledged some problems with using tests but still justified strongly for using tests because of the test benefits to learning. Two participants were skeptical test users as they had stronger beliefs than others on the problems and would prefer not to use too many tests. However, all participants used tests heavily in their courses. All participants also emphasized curbing cheating as very important and had very similar beliefs about what a fair test was. Overall, my findings highlight the need to continue working on test research and practice to promote better assessment approaches in engineering.

Package exams provides a framework for automatic generation of simple (statistical) exams. To employ the tools, users just need to supply a pool of exercises and a master file controlling the layout of the final PDF document. The exercises are specified in separate Sweave files (containing R code for data generation and LaTeX code for problem and solution description) and the master file is a LaTeX document with some additional control commands. This paper gives an overview on the main design aims and principles as well as strategies for adaptation and extension. Hands-on illustrations - based on example exercises and control files provided in the package - are presented to get new users started easily. (author´s abstract) / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

Package exams provides a framework for automatic generation of standardized statistical exams which is especially useful for large-scale exams. To employ the tools, users just need to supply a pool of exercises and a master file controlling the layout of the final PDF document. The exercises are specified in separate Sweave files (containing R code for data generation and LaTeX code for problem and solution description) and the master file is a LaTeX document with some additional control commands. This paper gives an overview of the main design aims and principles as well as strategies for adaptation and extension. Hands-on illustrations - based on example exercises and control files provided in the package - are presented to get new users started easily.

A influência de avaliações em larga escala no currículo é bem conhecida e discutida amplamente. Contudo, a influência de avaliações vestibulares no mesmo tem sido deixada de lado, bem como a discussão sobre sua influência nos próprios exames governamentais. O presente texto tenta abrir este caminho, analisando a alteração nos tipos de questões elaboradas pelo vestibular, no sentido de arcar com uma responsabilidade social que lhe foi imposta. É feita uma análise do nível cognitivo exigido pelas questões - com base na taxonomia de Bloom (1983) e nas classes de exigência cognitiva de Zoller (2002), entre outras características - bem como outros detalhes relevantes, como interdisciplinaridade, área da química abordada, habilidades e competências envolvidas e o índice de discriminação, ao longo de onze anos (2003 - 2013). Os resultados demonstram uma crescente preocupação com o modo como se mede as capacidades dos alunos avaliados por tais exames. A partir de então, discute-se brevemente sobre o uso dos exames vestibulares como base para a construção do currículo, bem como o modo com que os exames são tratados pelo meio leigo e suas consequências / The influence of large scale assessment on the curriculum is well known and widely discussed. However, a influence of pre-entrance tests on it has been put aside, as well as the discussion about is influence on governmental assessment. The present work tries to clear that pass, analysing if there is any significant change on the types of questions made by these pre-entrance exams, in a perspective of living up to the social responsibility that was imposed on them. It is made an analysis around the cognitive level required by the questions - based on Bloom\'s taxonomy (1983) and in Zollers cognitive skills requirements (2002) - amongst other relevant details, such as interdisciplinarity, chemistry field addressed, skills and competences involved and the discrimination rate, over the period of eleven years (2003 - 2013). The results show a growing worry towards the way the student\'s capability is being measured by these exams. From that, it\'s briefly discussed the use of such exams as base to building the curriculum, as well as how the exams are treated by the non-academics and its consequences.

Creating an exam that ensures an even coverage over all the Intended Learning Outcomes and at the same time ensures that to pass, the student should have passed all the Intended Learning Outcomes can be a difficult task. After an exam have been graded, formative feedback should be given to the students, especially in those cases where they did not pass the exam. This can be a time consuming process, and because of this, it is not always possible to give as good feedback as one would otherwise like. In this project an exam tool was created, for assisting in creating exams and give individual formative feedback to the students after an exam. By storing all the questions in a database, where each question is connected to an Intended Learning Outcome, along with writing the questions in a standardised format, with regards to point representations, grading rubrics and references it becomes possible to automatically generate exams. Generated individual feedback is created by combining the information in the question together with the students result. The feedback provides motivation of given grade, which topics a student should read up on, along with recommended reading instructions. In those cases a student got a full mark, it is also possible to provide further study instructions, this can be anything from recommended articles and book chapter, to courses. Differential privacy have been used to anonymize the grade distribution to make it possible to show the students how the exam went, without risk exposing what grade a certain student got. The exam tool created achieves all of these goals, however there are still much room for improvement. The anonymisation function needs further development, since differential privacy is not suitable for small datasets. The usability of the interface and feedback reports needs more work. However in its current state it is fully functional and have been used in numerous courses.

A influência de avaliações em larga escala no currículo é bem conhecida e discutida amplamente. Contudo, a influência de avaliações vestibulares no mesmo tem sido deixada de lado, bem como a discussão sobre sua influência nos próprios exames governamentais. O presente texto tenta abrir este caminho, analisando a alteração nos tipos de questões elaboradas pelo vestibular, no sentido de arcar com uma responsabilidade social que lhe foi imposta. É feita uma análise do nível cognitivo exigido pelas questões - com base na taxonomia de Bloom (1983) e nas classes de exigência cognitiva de Zoller (2002), entre outras características - bem como outros detalhes relevantes, como interdisciplinaridade, área da química abordada, habilidades e competências envolvidas e o índice de discriminação, ao longo de onze anos (2003 - 2013). Os resultados demonstram uma crescente preocupação com o modo como se mede as capacidades dos alunos avaliados por tais exames. A partir de então, discute-se brevemente sobre o uso dos exames vestibulares como base para a construção do currículo, bem como o modo com que os exames são tratados pelo meio leigo e suas consequências / The influence of large scale assessment on the curriculum is well known and widely discussed. However, a influence of pre-entrance tests on it has been put aside, as well as the discussion about is influence on governmental assessment. The present work tries to clear that pass, analysing if there is any significant change on the types of questions made by these pre-entrance exams, in a perspective of living up to the social responsibility that was imposed on them. It is made an analysis around the cognitive level required by the questions - based on Bloom\'s taxonomy (1983) and in Zollers cognitive skills requirements (2002) - amongst other relevant details, such as interdisciplinarity, chemistry field addressed, skills and competences involved and the discrimination rate, over the period of eleven years (2003 - 2013). The results show a growing worry towards the way the student\'s capability is being measured by these exams. From that, it\'s briefly discussed the use of such exams as base to building the curriculum, as well as how the exams are treated by the non-academics and its consequences.

Orientador: Antonio Miguel / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-23T20:08:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Silva_Alexandre_D.pdf: 7614967 bytes, checksum: 85745be6c340576d5153ae696e934b94 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: Este trabalho é um estudo de característica histórico-filosófica que busca evidenciar a relação de reforço mútuo entre o conhecimento matemático e os discursos meritocráticos - principalmente no âmbito da educação escolar - e defende a tese de que esta relação constitui um dos principais elementos que justificam a supervalorização do ensino da matemática em relação aos de outras disciplinas escolares. Para isso, buscamos, no capítulo 1, apresentar o modo como o discurso meritocrático moderno se estrutura, pondo em evidência a sua forte relação com a educação formal. Neste capítulo, mostramos também o modo como o discurso meritocrático se utiliza do conhecimento matemático, elegendo-o e elevando-o a instrumento de poder ao conferir-lhe o papel quase exclusivo de elemento objetivo de aferição do mérito individual. Nos capítulos 2, 3 e 4 identificamos e desenvolvemos algumas manifestações relacionais, historicamente situadas, que ilustram, de modo contundente, maneiras como o conhecimento matemático é utilizado como instrumento de medida do mérito individual. De forma um pouco mais detalhada, temos, no capítulo 2, a apresentação de um estudo dedicado ao período grego antigo, período este que antecipa as características fundamentais do culto ao mérito individual moderno (através da transfiguração do longínquo termo areté) e que vai fundar - através do pensamento platônico presente n'A República - os rudimentos da relação entre o conhecimento matemático e a meritocracia. No capítulo 3, enfatizamos dois movimentos que vão defender a meritocracia como base para a reforma social. O primeiro é o projeto republicano francês do século XVIII que, influenciado fortemente pelo pensamento iluminista, vai introduzir o exame de seleção para a École Polytechnique e constitui-lo como o principal símbolo da apologia ao mérito pessoal. O segundo é a criação do exame SAT, nos Estados Unidos da América, que também vai ser um dos signos da meritocracia escolar estadunidense do século XX. De acordo com nossas análises, tais movimentos promoveram o estabelecimento de uma política examinatória com base na qual o conhecimento matemático vai ocupar um lugar de indiscutível reconhecimento e distinção. Já o capítulo 4 é dedicado à questão do conhecimento matemático e a sua relação com os discursos meritocráticos, na conjuntura educacional brasileira. Nele, apresentamos diversas situações relacionais que apontam e contribuem para a defesa do argumento de que a educação básica nacional é fortemente inspirada pelo e para o ideal meritocrático e que a justificação da presença do conhecimento matemático em tal contexto se deve ao fato de atuar, tradicionalmente, como um dos principais elementos de medida do mérito educacional, tanto das pessoas quanto dos sistemas. No capítulo 5, com base em uma perspectiva bourdieusiana, apresentamos uma análise crítica das proposições e pretensões do discurso meritocrático escolar, sobretudo no que se refere ao modo como ele se apropria do conhecimento matemático como elemento aferidor do mérito individual. Finalizamos o trabalho com uma breve reflexão sobre a concepção atualmente corrente de meritocracia, bem como sobre o papel que o conhecimento matemático desempenha como colaborador dessa ordem de organização social. / Abstract: This work is a study of historical and philosophical feature that seeks to highlight the mutually reinforcing relationship between mathematical knowledge and meritocratic discourse - especially in the field of school education - and defends the thesis that this relationship is one of the main elements that justify the overvaluation of the teaching of mathematics in relation to other school subjects. For this, we seek, in chapter 1, to indicate how the modern meritocratic discourse is structured, highlighting its strong relationship with formal education. In this chapter, we also show how the meritocratic discourse using mathematical knowledge, electing him and bringing him to an instrument of power to give you the almost exclusive role of objective element of benchmarking individual merit. In chapters 2, 3 and 4 we have identified and developed some relational manifestations, historically situated, which illustrate so forceful ways that mathematical knowledge is used as a measuring tool of individual merit. In somewhat more detail, we have, in chapter 2, the presentation of a study dedicated to the ancient Greek period, a period that anticipates the fundamental characteristics of the modern cult of the individual merit (by transfiguration of ancient term arete) which will establish - platonic thought this through in The Republic - the rudiments of the relationship between mathematical knowledge and meritocracy. In chapter 3, we emphasize two movements that will uphold meritocracy as the basis for social reform. The first is the design of the eighteenth century French republican who strongly influenced by enlightenment thought, will introduce the selection examination for the École Polytechnique and constitutes it as the main symbol of apology to personal merit. The second is the creation of the SAT exam in the United States of America, which will also be one of the signs of the U.S. school meritocracy of the twentieth century. According to our analysis, such movements have promoted the establishment of a policy of examinations based on which mathematical knowledge will occupy an undisputed recognition and distinction. The chapter 4 is devoted to the question of mathematical knowledge and its relationship with the meritocratic discourse in Brazilian educational scenario. In it, we present several relational situations that link and contribute to the defense argument that the national basic education is strongly inspired by and for the meritocratic ideal and that the justification for the presence of mathematical knowledge in this context is due to the fact that work traditionally as one of the key elements of measuring educational merit, both people and systems. In chapter 5, a perspective based on Bourdieu, we present a critical analysis of proposals and claims of the school meritocratic discourse, particularly with regard to how he appropriates the mathematical knowledge as an element sealer individual merit. We finished the job with a brief reflection on the concept of meritocracy currently underway, as well as on the role that mathematical knowledge plays as a collaborator of this kind of social organization. / Doutorado / Ensino e Práticas Culturais / Doutor em Educação

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