06 March 2009

Knowledge Transfer Assessment

There are four ways to test whether students have acquired knowledge transfer skills according to Mayer (2001):
  1. Troubleshooting - by asking students why a system does not work.
  2. Redesign - by asking students for a redesign of a system for a different purpose.
  3. What-if - by asking students what would happen under other conditions.
  4. Principle - by asking students the function of a component in the system, or why a component behaves the way it does.

In Computer Science, this is pretty easy to do. Here are some examples:

  1. Troubleshooting - have students debug a program, or discover and debug another student's program.
  2. Redesign - have students build another version of an application.
  3. What-if - have students compare and contrast the use of different algorithms, database design, logic design, infrastructure, etc.
  4. Principle - have students construct context diagram, use case diagrams, etc. and explain how one component functions within the entire system.

References:

Mayer, R. (2001). Multimedia Learning. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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