Implementation of national higher education standard in electronics: students' perceptions of learning outcomes

Abstract

Recently, Ukrainian higher education institutions (UHEI) have undergone major changes in revising and implementing new policies, concerning the outcome-oriented reform in the national higher education standards (NHES). This paper describes research, conducted in Ukraine to collect the data on how new NHES in Electronics and program-based outcomes are perceived by undergraduate engineering students' in terms of achieving their learning outcomes. The results of the study suggest that while the importance of implementing outcome-oriented initiative is highly supported and documented by the UHEI, students do not see the clear relation of program-based outcomes to the acquired knowledge and skills. Regardless of their apparent unawareness of program-based outcomes, students claim to be able to demonstrate their acquired knowledge and skills in practice, which is supported by self-assessment of their progress as well as the data on students' average grades. Additionally, the study shows that program-based outcomes are rarely used to assess students' performance as the outcomes do not align with the assessment criteria. The study indicates that students’ awareness of higher education learning outcomes, based on NHES in Electronics Engineering (EE) programmes, is generally underestimated both by students and course developers. The results unveil the need to introduce a professional development program in order to train EE course developers to adequately implement NHES outcomes in designing EE courses as well as make existing assessment criteria outcome-oriented.