Development of An Improved Practicum Assessment Instrument for IT Programme from Industry’s Perspective

Abstract

Realizing that good Practicum instruments are crucial in ensuring the accuracy of its assessment, this paper proposed an improved design of the Practicum assessment instruments responsive to unsatisfactory feedbacks from industry regarding Practicum performance and assessment. Unsatisfactory feedback from industry and drawbacks of the existing assessment tool gathered from a preliminary study shows that an improved design of assesment instruments are crucially needed. Among the identified problem of the existing instruments are; the existing instruments are not outcome-based (OBE) compliant, the instruments can not measure the performance accurately (students’ final grade for Practicum doesnt reflect a real quality of the students), constructs assessing student’s technical aspects are too little while too many contructs measuring student’s soft skills are too many. To come out with the solution, a combination of Design Science Research methodology and Action Research are employed in designing the improved instruments. The improved design is focusing on student learning needs and policy by integrating Practicum elements, university’s expectation and industry’s expectation. Emphasises are given on integrating important elements  in achieving Practicum learning outcomes. The improved instrument has been successfuly evaluated and implemented for three cycles involving three academic semesters. The improved design is hope to be capable in measuring Practicum performance accurately and can be used to further assess many other aspects that reflect Practicum performance in preparing IT experts to face the industry as stated in IR 4.0.