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Bridging diverse institutions, multiple engineering departments, and industry: A case study in assessment planning
Journal of Engineering Education, Apr 1998 by McMartin, Flora, Van Duzer, Eric, Agogino, Alice
ABSTRACT
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As ABET and regional accreditation agencies focus their attention on student learning, effective planning processes and practices become critical to the departments and colleges that must initiate them. The lessons learned from the Synthesis Coalition's experience can be applied at the departmental level to meet the requirements of these agencies. The planning strategy focused on a collaborative process that involved all stakeholders: faculty, administrators, students, and industry representatives. The stakeholders validated and prioritized the Coalition's original goals and identified a specific set of abilities, criteria, and activities associated with them. (The goals included, to facilitate: communication, teamwork, hands-on facility with hardware, awareness of the social implications of engineering, modern industry practices, multi-disciplinary design, and open-ended problem solving.) The Coalition's industrial board provided written scenarios of "day in the life" challenges engineers face to help ensure that the values and goals the Coalition planned to assess matched those that industry felt were important. Next, course documents were analyzed to identify a set of assignments to use for developing authentic, performance-based assessment tools. This approach assured that by participating in the Synthesis Coalition assessment project, each campus prepared a core group of faculty to assess (and train other faculty to assess) student learning and ultimately document evidence of student learning for ABET accreditation.
I. INTRODUCTION
What is assessment?
Why do we need to assess?
How much time will I have to take to participate in this?
What are student learning outcomes?
What will I get from doing this?
How are we going to convince faculty to take assessment seriously?
How do we assess process rather than content based leaming?
I know what I am doing works; why should I do assessment?
These are the kinds of questions being asked at engineering departments across the United States as educators try to plan and implement assessment programs. These questions are real, they are thorny, they are messy. They challenge us to create programs that respond to the particular needs of our faculty and our schools.
Multiply these questions by seven diverse campuses (California Polytechnic State University, Hampton University, Iowa State University, Southern University, Stanford University, Tuskegee University, and the University of California at Berkeley) and throw in faculty from several engineering disciplines, and then scatter the participating universities across the country from coast to coast, and you get the complexity facing the NSF-supported Synthesis Coalition* as they developed their assessment process. This article will describe the lessons learned as a result of devising an assessment plan at the coalition level, and how departmental or college level assessment planners might apply them.
While the task of reaching agreement among faculty on curriculum matters at the department level is daunting, for the Synthesis Coalition, even the basic question of what abilities to assess required agreement among 40 faculty from six different engineering disciplines at universities with very different missions. Given that there are no common courses taught among these schools, consensus about what learning outcomes are important to assess had to be developed through a dialog generating a common, negotiated understanding among the participants.l In addition to generating consensus, creating faculty commitment to an ongoing collaborative assessment process was also the major challenge facing the Synthesis Coalition as it developed an assessment plan to evaluate the effects of seven years of the Coalition's diffuse reforms. The process the Synthesis Coalition created to address these challenges and ultimately to craft a process of ongoing and performance-based assessment,23 was guided by principles of teamwork, collaboration, and faculty/industry interaction-all of which are important to devising an assessment plan regardless of the level (course, major, or department) or complexity (one college or coalitions of colleges). The focus of this article will be to detail this process at the coalition level and draw connections to the major and department levels. II. CHALLENGE: TO CREATE FACULTY AND INSTITUTIONAL BUY-IN AND COMMITMENT TO ASSESSMENT
In both program evaluation and assessment, collaboration of stakeholders in the process is critical to success.45 For the Synthesis Coalition this meant collaboration between students, faculty and administrators, and representatives of the industries who ultimately employ engineering graduates. In order to ensure the stakeholders' commitment to the assessment process they were given clearly defined roles that kept them actively involved from the initial planning stages of the project to the final analysis of the data.
A. Faculty
Many of the Synthesis Coalition's faculty were already instituting small scale classroom research projects,?' and some had been involved with in-depth course level assessment projects involving, for example, video analysis,8 in-depth questionnaires,9 Internet kiosk projects,lo and evaluating spatial reasoning skills.11 However, because assessment at the broader coalition level was a new step for a majority of the participants, uncertainty remained regarding how committed faculty would be to the assessment planning process. This was a critical concern since research on faculty involvement in assessment planning 12 offers strong evidence that the role of faculty, in this case, the Synthesis project leaders, is essential to developing a successful assessment program.
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Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
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- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
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- More »