Eliciting students' interpretations of engineering representations

Understanding what students truly learn is contingent on choosing an assessment method that affords students with the opportunity to fully express what they know. Allowing students to represent their ideas using questions open to multiple representational responses provides them with a choice. This choice can be used to highlight the students' own personal learning styles, so that the instructor gains a better understanding of what the student has learned. This study found that questions written to openly accept multiple representations lead to a higher student use of alternatives to written description, which is commonly the default form of assessment chosen by most engineering instructors.