Abstract

Background: Development of higher engineering education requires under-standing on teaching, learning and assessment. The content being taught and boundary conditions, such as available resources, must be taken into consideration. In practice it is not possible to implement everything that is presented as desirable in educational research and a compromise is needed, where such a teaching, learning and assessment environment is created that is both theoretically sound and useful in practice.

Purpose: The purpose of this report is twofold: Firstly, to present a teaching, learning and assessment environment which can be used as a base for educational practice and development. Secondly, we present two cases, in both of which the implementation is based mainly on the ideas of constructive alignment and the key element has been to find those assessment procedures that are most useful for the attainment of learning outcomes.

Scope/method: The report begins with a discussion on research about suitable teaching, learning and assessment environment with special emphasis on constructive alignment. Continuous assessment with its pros and cons and uses in our environment is also covered. Our report ends with our two educational cases and discussion.

Conclusion: Based on quantitative (pass rate, grades) and qualitative data (student feedback) obtained from our cases, we claim that the use of continuous assessment, which can also be justified by learning and assessment research, is an efficient approach in creating a well functioning course. Continuous assessment also provides us with real-time information about student learning and this enables us to make well founded changes even during a course.