Authentic Assessment: Engineering

Indigenous Community Consultation Project

Description:

Dr. Alon Eisenstein teaches engineering entrepreneurship and leadership and incorporates experiential and authentic learning and assessment into his courses. While industry and community engagement may not always be feasible or even advisable within all courses, there are ways to frame learning within the context of community partnerships. For example, in APSC 201 Technical Communication, students collaborate in groups representing a team of engineers who need to prepare a recommendation report for a fictional renewable energy developer who is preparing for consultation with an Indigenous community. While the developer is fictional, the scenario is realistic, and the Indigenous community is chosen from real Indigenous communities within Canada. For more information about this authentic assessment see below.

Attribution:

Indigenous Community Consultation Project © 2026 by Jannik Eikenaar, Natalie Forssman, Laura Patterson, Graham Webb , Jing Li , Richard Aleong, and Alon Eisenstein is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

In this scaffolded assignment, students work in teams to create a recommendation report for a renewable energy developer who is preparing for consultation with an Indigenous community. This involves oral and written communication and reflecting on ethical, practical, legal, interpersonal and intercultural demands of engineering communication. The submission includes:

  • Team contract (ungraded)
  • Annotated Bibliography (10%)
  • Project Progress Report (3%)
  • Team Presentation (17%)
  • Team Report (25%)
  • Reflective Essay (8%)

Total weight for the course = 63%.

This assignment addresses all course learning outcomes:

  • Analyze the rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, and context) of technical
    communication in engineering.
  • Create effective written and oral communication documents in accordance with technical communication genre, to address various engineering related rhetorical situations.
  •  Demonstrate ethical communication practices.
  • Apply principles of intercultural communication, specifically when communicating with
    Indigenous communities.
  • Student teams start the assessment in Week 7 and submit the final report in Week 13 – so students work on the assignment for a total of 6 weeks.
  • Because of the scaffolded nature of the assessment, instructor time to grade is incremental.
  1. Meet together as a team to decide on how the group will operate.
  2. Analyze the fictional scenario.
  3. Create an annotated bibliography of appropriate sources related to the fictional scenario.
  4.  Write a midway progress report.
  5. Present as a team on consultation preparation.
  6. Submit a team report focusing on consultation prep (includes peer evaluation).
  7. Write an individual reflective essay about the role of engineers in meeting Canada’s obligation for Truth and Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples and First Nations.
  • Canvas is used for communication, scenario description and submission.
  • iPeer is used for peer evaluation.
  • Teams choose their own collaboration tools.

Each assignment is graded using a unique rubric that captures the technical communication elements that are most relevant, accompanied by feedback that highlights where students can improve on in their submissions.

For the group-submitted assignment (team presentation and team report), peer evaluations are also solicitated from students and applied as grade modifiers. As mentioned, iPeer is used for this purpose.

Here are some of dimensions that are used for grading the various assignments:

Annotated Bibliography
  • The description summarizes the source’s most important points in 1-2 sentences.
  • The evaluation critically analyzes the source in 1-2 sentences.
  • The rationale explains the relevance of this source to the consultation project.
Project Progress Report
  • Audience and Purpose
  • Organization and Structure
  • Content Development
  • Style, Language and Tone
  • Formatting and Overall Impression
Team Presentation
  •  Organization
  •  Visual Aids Design
  •  Content Development
  •  Style, Language and Tone
Team Report
  •  Front Matter
  •  Executive Summary
  •  Introduction
  •  Technical Considerations
  •  Community Description
  •  Impact Analysis
  •  Consultation Considerations
  •  Conclusions
  •  Recommendations
  •  References
  •  Organization and Structure
  •  Style, Language and Tone
  •  Formatting and Overall Impression
Reflective Essay
  • Audience and Purpose
  • Organization and Structure
  • Style, Language and Tone
  •  Formatting and Overall Impression
Evaluation Criteria
  • Participation
  • Initiative
  • Quality of work
  • Teamwork
  • Professionalism

A 5-point scale is assigned to each criterion: 0 (Unacceptable) to 4 (Exemplary).