NBA Accreditation and Teaching-Learning in Engineering (NATE)

Professor N. J Rao
Department of Electronics Systems Engineering,
Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.
Lecture 05
Education, Teaching, Instruction and Assessment
Greetings and welcome to module 1, unit 5 of NATE, that is NBA Accreditation teaching and
learning in Engineering.

(Refer Slide Time: 00:45)

Here in the last unit we tried to understand the nature of Self-Appraisal Report and the
Centrality of Closing the Quality Loop at all levels of outcomes. As you can see we are
looking at the entire process of teaching and learning within some framework and that
framework is provided by two things - one is NBA Accreditation; the other is outcomes
based education.

These are the two pillars you can say of, that provide a framework for looking at all aspects
of engineering education. So, in the last unit, we looked at self-appraisal report and all the
elements of that briefly mentioned and then we looked at what are these central features of
that. One of the central feature of that is closing the quality loop at all levels. While we are
going to look at all the criteria in great detail in the module 3 of this course, but the last unit
just presented a brief picture of the nature of the self-appraisal report.
(Refer Slide Time: 02:19)

Coming to unit 5, it is a long title that we gave and the title is based on education, learning,
assessment, teaching and instruction. As a teacher or as teachers all of us use these words.
Unfortunately they are not used necessarily in the right kind of meaning or in right kind of
context.

We felt that you reinterpret these words these are all familiar words all the words are known
to everyone but yet they are not necessarily used in the right context and to give the right
meaning and that is a reason why we want you to reinterpret the familiar words education,
learning, assessment, teaching and instruction. And also one minor thing which we will again
elaborate in later in module 2, understand the centrality of assessment in facilitating good
learning.
(Refer Slide Time: 03:41)

We start with the word education. It is not a new word everyone uses all the time, we in our
conversation we use it readily, but in a formal sense if you want to define “education refers to
in its broadest sense any act or experience that has formative effect on the mind, character or
physical ability of an individual.”

That is any kind of experience that has formative affect on the mind, character and physical
ability of an individual you can call it as education. In this broad sense; the education never
ends because all the time you are experiencing your interacting with the outside world to their
extent those experiences will have influence on your mind and character and sometimes
physical abilities as well.

So, in that sense we truly learn from our experiences through our lives. Education happens all
the time in our lives until our death. But here education in its technical sense now is the
process in which society through schools, colleges and universities and other institutions
deliberately transmits its cultural heritage; its accumulated knowledge; values; skills from
one generation to the other.

That is the reason why this school education differs considerably from one country to the
other. Because each country will have to decide which part of its cultural heritage it wants to
transmit to the next generation of people.

Education and the technical sense - we are looking at what happens in schools, colleges and
universities or similar institutions. So, in our context it is concerned with intentional learning
like in schools, colleges and universities. When you enter a school or a college they are
expected to learn something that means there is a curriculum and there is something is
already decided by some process and the student has to learn the things that have been
already decided. To their extent education is concerned with intentional learning like in
schools, colleges and universities.

(Refer Slide Time: 06:32)

We come to why we should be concerned with the philosophy of education. Society through
some processes is deciding to educate its people, but to educate people wisely we must know
what we educate them to become? Engineering education for example - What kind of
engineers do we want to produce? Is it something that a group of people feel that they are
what is that the student should learn or is there any framework within which you make that
decision.

So, to know what we educate them to become, it is necessary to ask what can be the purpose
of life and what sort of life it should be. This leads to the necessity to consider education
philosophically.

Again translating that into engineering what is the purpose of life of an engineer? What sort
of life it should be? Then you have to define who is a good engineer which we made an
attempt earlier in the first unit saying that, who is a good engineer? Right? That our definition
of good engineer again that definition will depend on the context.

Our context is at this point of time in India based on the current state of affairs or current
state of the society, what are the desirable characteristics of a good engineer. At some level
people have to agree to some common, call it parameters or characteristics of the good
engineer and that is the reason why you require to consider education philosophically. So,
essentially education philosophy involves the application of formal philosophy to education

(Refer Slide Time: 08:56)

The moment we come to philosophy there is nothing like a single one or a possibly any two
people exactly will agree with what philosophy of education is or for that matter what
philosophy is. Broadly we have the following schools of philosophy - idealism, realism,
pragmatism, existentialism and analysis.

Even people may not agree with this kind of classification, this is one convenient method of
classifying philosophies. One should agree pick one from here what you consider is
appropriate to this, for example at least at higher education what the philosophy of
pragmatism is considered as a platform or basis for considering all issues related to education
let say at higher level.

We will not go through trying to define or defend any of these decisions. It is only to bring it
to the attention of the teachers that there are five, these five schools of philosophy and one
can look at their programs through any of these philosophies, but that is the completely
different those who are interested are welcome to explore these philosophies in relation to
engineering.
(Refer Slide Time: 10:35)

Now, coming to higher education, what are the characteristic of higher education? One is
their formal programs that means somebody has a structure like in our case there are 4 years,
they are based on semester system and there is a whole lot of things that is to the formal one.
That means there is nothing like total freedom at all levels between for both teachers and
students.

And unlike schools aims of higher education cannot be under not that universe, by and large
what happens in a country the aims of school education are broadly the same. There is not too
much of difference between one place to the other place. Whereas at higher education it need
not be, there is no need for the aims of higher education to be universal. That is the first
characteristic of higher education.

Universities and colleges offering higher education general programs will identify the aims
called program outcomes. That is if you are offering a course like BA in history or BA in
sociology or BSc in physics any of these general programs; what we consider the outcomes
of the program are decided by the university or sometimes even the college.

If it is autonomous - college itself is required to identify in today’s context the program

outcomes. In case of professional courses like engineering, the concerned accrediting agency
will identify the program outcomes, that means it is not left to the choice of the college or
university. There is a national accrediting agency for example, if you take architecture or
medicine the so called program outcomes or the entire professional course is designed and
given by the accrediting agency.
Not only that, some amount of freedom is given to the department offering the program to
add some more outcomes to this program outcomes, we call this additional outcomes as
programs specific outcomes. So, what happens in the case of program outcomes, they are the
same across all disciplines, across all engineering programs, whereas program specific
outcomes are specific to a particular branch and that to their defined by the department.

(Refer Slide Time: 13:48)

We come to the process of teaching, we looked at education; we looked what is a higher

education program. We look at the teaching, teaching is a process of helping other to
acquire knowledge, skills and values - that is what the teacher does. How does he do?
Teaching is a process of attending to people’s needs. experiences, feelings and intervening so
that they learn particular things.

These particular things are decided by the curriculum. What the student should learn are
decided by the curriculum. So teacher essentially does several things, that means he mainly
intervenes and who what are these interventions. Interventions commonly take the form of
questioning, listening, giving information, explaining some phenomenon, demonstrating a
skill or process, testing, understanding, capacity and facilitating learning activities, such as
note taking, discussions, assignment writing, simulations and so on. The interventions take
several forms and what kind of intervention is to be taken place is decided by the teacher. So,
this is what teaching process is.
(Refer Slide Time: 15:19)

So, to that extent there are any number of models of teaching, in fact there are several classes
of models, there are large number of classes of models under each class we have several
models again. Essentially it applies to mainly school education. So, models of teaching may
help teachers to create conducive environments for learning.

So, if I follow some model then I can plan my classroom teaching according to that model
rather than doing it arbitrarily and models of teaching may help teachers to plan learning
centred educational experiences. These also may simulate development of new and better
forms of opportunities for education. A new teacher for example may identify the model of
teaching that he would prefer to follow and then plan his teaching within that framework.
(Refer Slide Time: 16:33)

This is one of the most popular model of teaching due to William Glasser which was
provided in 1962, it belongs to the what is called personal family of models of teaching. We
will not elaborate the features of this personal family and what are the features? The teacher
should identity instructional objectives.

The teacher should also know the entering behaviour of students. That means what kind of
students do you have? What abilities do they have? With what prior knowledge and skills
they come in to your class. This is what the teacher will have to identify and then he follows
certain preferred or selected instructional procedures. And then he assesses the performance
of the students, these are the four characteristic for teacher I think any teacher can readily
relate to all these four.

But you should notice the success of this model depends upon the competency and ability of
the teacher in terms of skills like the formulation of objectives, use of proper strategies and
techniques of evaluations. This Glasser model of teaching is meaningful or will be
successful corresponding to the competency and ability of the teacher. So, the teacher has a
major role to play if you are following Glasser model of teaching.
(Refer Slide Time: 18:21)

We come to the other process namely the learning, here there are two actors always one is
teacher the other are students. So, when teacher teaches the goal is to facilitate the students to
learn, we must also understand what learning is? Learning is acquiring new knowledge,
behaviour, skills, values, preferences or understanding.

If any of these things happen we are learning. As we learn our conception of phenomena
change and we see the world differently. If we do not learn adequately then our view of the
world may not change at all. It should be noted position of information is not synonymous
with learning. If one reels out all kinds of facts and figures that is position of information or I
would say data it is not synonymous with learning.

If we want a biologist’s definition of learning, “learning is stabilising through repeated dues

certain appropriate and desirable synapsis in the brain”. We will spend 1 unit on the kind of
role our understanding the brain plays in learning; that will do it at a later stage.
(Refer Slide Time: 19:54)

We look at only 3 important theories of learning. There are many theories of learning, we will
just confine ourselves to three, these are the most dominant ones, and in fact the first learning
theory is behaviourism due to Watson. There behaviourism considers learning is acquisition
of a new behaviour through conditioning and behaviourism believed; when it was proposed
in 1920s there was hardly any proper understanding of the brain.

So, they made an assumption brain is a black box the only thing that we can measure is what
are the stimuli that you are giving and what are the responses of the individual. These are the
only things that are measurable. The whole learning theory - behaviourism is based on a
stimulus and response.

And then what kind of sequence of stimuli will lead to what kind of sequence of responses.
Under what conditions can I bring out desirable response from the individual, that is the kind
of approach that was taken and quite a few of the practices of the schools and even at higher
education level, they are based on the behaviourism.

For example, if you repeatedly practice your response to certain stimuli can be conditioned or
can be improved. So, what happens one of the consequences of this you give practise
problems, that particular method is the outcome of behaviourism. While it is super-seeded by
other but still it is not invalid but behaviourism does not completely explain the behaviour of
individuals.
Next is cognitivism, Piaget proposed first and possibly tens of thousands of researchers have
worked on this. Humans learn by generating knowledge and meaning through sequential
development of their cognitive abilities, including recognition, recollection, analysis,
reflection, application, creation, understating and evaluation.

We are going to focus much on the cognitivist approach to learning, for example, the
cognitive processes focus on processing information. How do you process? We have given a
long list and that is where we will be looking at our taxonomy of learning is dominantly
based on cognitivism. We will look at that in the later units.

(Refer Slide Time: 23:16)

Third important one is called social constructivism, it is due to John Dewey, Bruner, Piaget
and Vygotsky. It considers that learning occurs within a context that itself is a part of what is
learned. Though you are teaching the same technical topic, same subject in one well equipped
classroom by an expert and in a good nice environment or the one that you are teaching in a
very ill equipped, ill qualified faculty member the context are vastly different and whatever
the students learn; the impact of the context is also carried.

So, the context cannot be dissociated with what you learnt and to that extent knowing and
doing cannot be separated; and learning is a process that is extended over time and we are
just making very brief statements obviously we encourage teachers to explore these 3
learning theories a little bit.

I think every teacher should explore at least these 3 theories besides many other theories that
exist. It should be remembered learning is a process that is extended over time, it just does
not happen in a very short period. That you explain and people seem to understand, seem to
even solve the problem immediately but it does not mean that you have learnt, it takes
considerable time for that to be completely internalised and truly the learning has actually
happened it takes certain time.

This is the one teacher should pay attention in the sense - one of the mistakes that is done is
that the curricular at many places are overloaded. As a teacher you want your student to
know all kinds of things and as soon as something is kind of addressed in the classroom you
think that the learning has been facilitated. It does not happen as it takes considerable time
especially the students with lesser cognitive abilities it will take lot of time to that extent the
curriculum should be matched with the abilities of the student and the time required.

As a consequence of social constructivism, some of the learning methods that they have come
like discovery, hands on, experiential, collaborative, project based and task based learning are
the consequence of social constructivism.

(Refer Slide Time: 26:38)

We come to another very important aspect of teaching and learning - assessment. The formal
definition of assessment, it is a measure of performance. What do I measure to know that the
student has learnt something? Another associated word is evaluation. Evaluation is an
interpretation of assessment, if the student has performed let us say conducted an experiment
then evaluation is to determine how well he has performed or can I associate some grade or
mark or something with that performance.

Assessment and evaluation are two different things, unfortunately many times these two
terms are used synonymously - that should not take place. Also we consider/we think we
taught well in the classroom, the teaching and learning has taken place and assessment or
examination is a necessary evil. Actually, we now presently look at the centrality of
assessment in learning. Our assessment tools, tells students what we consider to be important.

For example, if we consider some part of the subject is not important, we may not ask any
questions or not conduct a quiz in that. So, students will look at what kind of questions are
being asked at various points during a semester and they will accordingly prepare. That
means through your assessment tools you are communicating to the students, what you
consider to be important.

For example, in my examinations are tests, I cannot ask superficial questions and expect the
students to learn something meaningfully or deeply. So, assessment is the key. Teachers
guide students to learn through their assessments, you can even say that it is a glue that links
the components of a course - its content, instructional methods and skills development. In fact
you can even say assessment drives student learning.

I am sure you are all familiar with that - always students prepare for the exams. Teacher in
my opinion has no right to say that student should not worry about exams and they consider
you should focus on learning and should not focus on examinations. If these two are different
then it is the fault of the teacher rather than the student. Learning well and performing well in
that examination or in assessments they should be the same; that is the role of the assessment.

You should not/your assessment should not create any issue related to performing an
examination and learning well should not be considered two different things. So, again to
reinforce that we are once again saying assessment should be in alignment with stated
outcomes of education.
(Refer Slide Time: 30:37)

There are two types of assessments - formative assessment, assessment for learning or
educative assessment. Means when I am asking when I am doing assessing formative
assessment, I am trying to find out to what extent the student has learnt and that will also
provide me the basis for providing feedback and also to know how the student/to what extent
they have learned.

That means in formative assessment, you are not trying to use the results for grading or
giving marks for that. Whereas summative assessment that is assessment of learning to find
out what is at the student has learnt you conduct summative assessment. I am sure that faculty
are familiar with these two words formative assessment and summative assessment.
(Refer Slide Time: 31:38)

We come to instruction – it is another word, for example, we may use teaching and
instruction bit synonymously but instruction is slightly different. The purpose of instruction
is to help people learn and develop - very simple. But learning and development can be in any
of the 4 domains cognitive, affective, psychomotor and spiritual.

Let say we keep the spiritual part a little aside because we do not even know how to formally
define and how to prepare the student for it or there can be several controversies over that.
So, we will mainly look at the learning and development can be cognitive, affective and
psychomotor. We will look at the affective and psychomotor domains a little later.

Learning can certainly occur without instruction. You do not require instruction at all like if
you walk on the street by just observing what is happening or reacting to external situation
you are learning something. So, learning can certainly occur without instruction but
instructional designers apply the principles of learning to the design of external events we call
instruction. That means the instructor plan some external events to facilitate learning. These
externals event are planed based on the principal some principals of learning, that is what the
instructional designers do.
(Refer Slide Time: 33:28)

Instruction is a set of events embedded in purposeful activities that facilitate learning - if you
want a formal definition instruction. Events can be external to the learner like it could be a
printed page, an instructors’ lecture or the activities of a group of students or conducting a
laboratory and so on.

Whereas internal mental events, that is directing attention, rehearsing, reflecting and
monitoring progress these are internal mental events. So, the teacher will have to pay
attention to both for him to do good instruction.

(Refer Slide Time: 34:15)

There are Instructional System Design we call it ISD. There are models for instructional
system design and these models present a process a teacher or instructional designer can use
to plan and prepare for instruction. There are many models and there is nothing like this is the
most superior model or this is the only way to do there is nothing like that, but people may
prefer a particular ISD model.

Different instruction design theories differ in the process used to apply those theories to
particular situation. So, the process part can be different from one model to the other and the
example that we are going to take is what is called ADDIE, ADDIE is a short name for
analysis, design, development, implement and evaluate or there are several variants of the
same. We are going to look at this particular instructional system design model namely
ADDIE.

(Refer Slide Time: 35:36)

As an exercise we would like you to give your reasons why you should be concerned with
philosophy of higher education, mainly to encourage you to read a little bit and say why you
should really worry about philosophy of higher education. Which one of the learning theories
you can relate to more in your experience and why?

We talked about three learning theories and you can explore more learning theories and if
you prefer you can say, which is the one you can relate better. Why do you need to be
concerned with assessment in engineering education and how. Give two examples of your
approaches to instruction you felt led to better learning by students in the courses you taught.

Write hundred words for each example, giving some evidence of better learning. This is we
would like to learn from you if you are able to share the results of your exercise, it will be
great learning experience for us as teachers.
(Refer Slide Time: 36:52)

In the next unit we try to understand the nature of program educational objectives and
program outcomes. We talked about outcomes but these are all classified into four levels we
will look at this two namely program educational objectives and program outcomes. Thank
you for your attention.