THE ASSESSMENT OF ENGINEERING REASONING RECORDED IN STUDENT ENGINEERING DESIGN JOURNALS

An engineer’s journal, also known as a logbook, is a key document where the individual contributions to a project and the evolving design rationale are made explicit. The development of project-based learning at Ecole Polytechnique Montreal is an ideal setting for students to use an individual or project journal. In the 1 st year design project, a strong emphasis is put on the information elements and structure that must be present in the student’s journal. In the 2nd and 3rd year projects the journal’s content builds on this structure. This paper focuses on methods used to assess the contents of a 4th year student’s journal. In this assessment model, the evaluator grades the journal content and provides feedback to the individual students according to three key parameters, namely: content diversity, critical thinking demonstration and project management information. The critical thinking abilities are assessed by reading through the journal content using a predefined analysis grid. This grid contains 11 “Critical Thinking intellectual standards” reformulated as questions so students and evaluators alike can get a better understanding of how the criteria applies specifically to journals. The paper discusses how the implementation and assessment of journals provides a formalized assessment structure to an empirical engineering practice. Moreover, a number of unexpected outcomes from the journal assessment process are also reported, such as: the increase of reusable information, the identification of an individual’s contributions to a project, the sparse use of sketches to solve complex spatial problems, etc. Finally, the authors conclude on new perspectives to increase the efficiency of the journal assessments along with new opportunities for collaboration and exchange of information in a project context through the use of electronic journals.