Efeito da implementação de feedbacks semanais sobre relatórios de práticas de laboratório de materiais de construção civil

Abstract

The courses of Construction Materials, from the third and fourth semesters of the civil engineering programme, are the first opportunities for specific contact of students with topics that will be part of their professional experience. Through practical classes in the laboratory, students learn about the process of material characterization tests and their technological control, preparing technical reports for each class. As a result of the students' recurring errors in the texts, a weekly feedback routine on the reports was implemented, as well as a standardized model of simplified practical class report. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the benefits of those two actions, performed by the course’s mentoring team. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures taken, a statistical analysis was used to compare previous grades with grades obtained after the implementation of the measures. An average grade increase was observed in all quartiles analyzed. A greater increase in the performance of students with lower grades (especially the 4th quartile) was observed prior to the application of the feedback routine, with this evolution being approximately 18% in the average grade of the reports. The strategy balanced the performance of the students, who had more dispersed grades before the implementation, with a coefficient of variation of 11.8%, reducing to 5.4% at the end of the semester. Finally, it was found that 82% of the class had its performance improved after the implementation of the feedbacks system, confirming the effectiveness of the method for the situation analyzed here.