CONDUCTING ASSESSMENT WORKSHOP FOR STAFF DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, a private university situated in Perak, Malaysia,
offers Engineering and Technology Degree Programs. Faculty members are from the
departments of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering,
Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, Computer and
Information Sciences, and Management and Humanities. Regardless of their
teaching experiences, newly recruited faculty members are required to participate in
the Education Delivery and Assessment Workshop, organized by the Academic
Central Services Department in collaboration with the Human Resource
Department. Most of these new faculty members have undergone no formal teaching
training and depend primarily on their past teaching experiences gained from
previous institutions of higher learning that they were affiliated with. For those
coming from industries, it is a new experience altogether. Yet, these lecturers will be
expected to do teaching at the start of the semester, and their performance in class is
subjected to evaluation by the students whom they teach. What kind of education
delivery and assessment methods preparation are in store for them? The Academic
Central Services Department plays an important role in providing in-house training
with the main objective of the training being to serve as a means of introducing the
education delivery and assessment culture that meet the standards set by the
university. It is made compulsory for all new faculty members of this university to
undergo the Staff Development Program. This program also acts as a refresher
course for a few lecturers whose evaluations have yet to meet the minimum standard
measurement. The program is effectively an Education Delivery and Assessment
workshop conducted by the university’s trained facilitators who are senior faculty
members with consistently good teaching track record, typically identified by the
university. The objective of this paper is to share the experience of how the in-house
assessment training session is conducted and the outcomes of a typical assessment
workshop session. A pretest and a posttest are dispensed to measure if the learning
outcomes of the workshop have been achieved. A questionnaire issued by the Human
Resource Management Department is also used to obtain feedback from the
workshop participants. The results obtained are encouraging and show that the
training on assessment methods has had a promising impact.