A Systematic Multi-Level Assessment Approach to Enhance Students' Academic Performance in Sequential Logic Design.

This paper presents a systematic student-level approach to assess the impact of problem-based learning on enhancing students' performance in an undergraduate Digital Logic Design course. The problem was assigned as a mini-project and chosen to strengthen the student's understanding of an advanced part of the course, namely the sequential logic design. The study included data from semesters where students were assigned projects and other semesters without projects. The proposed approach relies on dividing students into groups based on their academic performance level to study how the project impacts these groups' performance. A baseline performance metric was created at the beginning of the semester to classify the students into three groups. At the end of the semester, the students' groups were reassessed to capture performance changes. The results consistently showed improvement across all students' levels in the semesters where the project was conducted. While it is natural for students' performance to change between the beginning and the end of the semester, the results show that the percentage of students who improved their performance level has increased in semesters with a project compared to the semesters with no projects. Also, the percentage of students whose performance degraded by the end of the semester has decreased in the semesters with a project. These results were also supported by an independent student survey that confirmed the positive project impact on the students' grasp of sequential circuit design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]