An Improved Course Assessment Measurement for Analyzing Learning Outcomes Performance Using Rasch Model

Course Learning Outcomes (CLO) shall be used to state the expected knowledge that the student supposed to acquire at the end of the semester and shall be outlined according to the Bloom Taxonomy. Students can estimate the level of their knowledge and skills that were obtained at the end of each course using the CLOs. Unfortunately, there was no formal method for measuring performance of CLO for each course. The usual procedure is to distribute questionnaires to the students manually or via online. Students provide their performances for the CLO using a likert performances for the CLO for all courses. The results from this study can guide the lecturer to monitor the performance for each consequently leading towards improvements in the taught courses. Unfortunately, this method cannot accurately portray the students' performances through actual evaluation. Therefore, this paper aims to measure the effectiveness of the teaching and learning method by measuring the performance of the CLO using Rasch model. The methodology for this study consists of three phases, which are planning, classification and result analysis. The output of this study is the actual students' performances for the CLO for all courses. The results from this study can guide the lecturer to monitor the performance for each CLO and consequently leading towards improvements in the taught courses. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Kongres Pengajaran & Pembelajaran UKM, 2010