LEARNING ASSESSMENT STRATEGIES FOR AN EDUCATIONAL CONSTRUCTION SAFETY VIDEO GAME

摘要

Education is crucial to a safe and healthy working environment in construction and engaging students in the construction engineering and management programs in this very important subject is the catalyst to the success of safety education. This paper discusses the evaluation of an innovative learning assessment tool, Safety Inspector, for the education of construction safety. Safety Inspector is a 3D video game previously developed to provide a "safe" environment that engages students in recognizing comprehensive hazards, evaluates student performance, and enhances student learning interests. Evaluation strategies developed in the research take into considerations student learning objectives for construction safety, limitations of available assessment resources, logistics of the course, signals that reflect underlying cognitive learning processing, and statistical validity requirements. To implement the evaluation, game-based and paper-based tests were both administered for the experiment with a follow-up questionnaire in an undergraduate class at the University of Washington. Some patterns were identified as a result of the evaluation. The major lesson learned is that when the hazard recognition tasks are presented similarly in different test modes, testing scores could be more statistically relevant. However, certain types of hazards are difficult to identify in the game-base test because they require the change of viewing angles that do not naturally occur in a virtual model.