Measurement and Evaluation in Architecture Education Systems with an Emphasis on Team-Based Learning and Peer Evaluation Method

Architectural education is one of the key issues in the growth and actualization of Iranian architecture as well as determination of future layout of architecture in Iran and all over the world. Higher education as the highest stage of the educational system is an important part of a dynamic community which has a direct impact on social norms and behaviors and explains the political-economic as well as valuable-cultural process of a society. It seems that Higher Education of Iran cannot meet specialized and professional job needs of society while the structure of fields of study is incompatible with our culture which causes low quality of working in most of graduates who are attracted to the professional job market. This could be due to the weakness in teaching, teaching methods and evaluation methods. Training creativity and critical behaviors in architecture students in order to present architectural plans and well evaluation of them, is complicated and lack of attention to these effective and efficient elements face the education system with challenges. Professional abilities which are resulted from educational process make some concerns about the lack of effective cohesion and communication between the various theoretical and practical courses, which cause current big gap between architecture classes and workshops. By analyzing the performance of architecture faculties and students, increasing the quality of higher education and meeting society needs can be possible. Variety of teaching methods in architecture classroom can cause different results, but nowadays most common architecture method is team based learning. In this method, the teacher divides students into some groups which required a different approach during training and evaluation. Team-based learning is a new training approach with the aims of improving learning, increasing problem solving skills, being sure of previous studying by students and creating a high energy class. Optimization of this method for using in educational architecture classes is discussed in the part of this study. The purpose of this approach is to learn based on the creation of an active and participated environment. There are some comparative evaluations which help teachers to compare the results of this method of teaching with others to gain the strength and weakness of this method. The evaluation of teaching methods should promote the scientific and practical ability of students. The evaluation should be based on educational goals and the ability to organize the training courses and also the methods of training. Overall, the finding of the evaluation is based on its finding and requires a judgment about effectiveness, social effectiveness and desirability of a process or program, and finally an outcome based on the goals and values. Evaluation of the projects should be done without challenging elements such as social, political and managerial relations by focusing on scientific and practical and professional criteria. Different nature of architecture makes the criteria for judging not one hundred percent fixed and unchanged. Besides the undeniable role of human factors in judging, makes the constant percentage of deviations from the standards. In order to this element, in other part of the paper, the peer evaluation method as an optimum approach in evaluation of architecture plans, will be discussed as a proper method of evaluation in team-based learning. Peer evaluation method has a lot of advantages such as increasing student’s learning, encouraging student to be responsible, engaging in training process through discussion and improving discussing skills, wide thinking, well judging in a situation, encouraging student to learn deeply and increasing their self-confidence. During implementing peer evaluation method, the teacher should try to make an environment in which the students feel that he/she evaluate his/her work while evaluating others. This issue leads to decrease negative attitudes while the student feels that he/she will be evaluated by others as well as evaluates them.