Sequential Course Outcome Linkage: A New Look at the Structural Engineering Curriculum of a Civil Engineering Program

In Fall of 2004, the faculty of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Citadel adopted an expanded set of fifteen program outcomes identified in the American Society of Civil Engineers Body of Knowledge and completed the development of common course goals with appropriate levels of cognitive achievement based on Bloom's taxonomy. In addition, the department has adopted a holistic process for investigating and analyzing the linkage of individual course goals in various discipline-specific areas of concentration within the curriculum. Sequential course outcome maps or "threads" have now been developed for each of the department's major discipline tracts (structural, environmental, site development, and transportation engineering). Through the process of developing sequenced course threads, a major objective was to identify the effectiveness of how course goals are linked within the undergraduate curriculum. This paper expands the work presented by Bower et al. (1) describing the impact of identifying threads for the environmental engineering tract by presenting both similar conclusions and some new findings that appear to be relevant only to the structural engineering tract. In addition, the process and corresponding tabulations used to quantify the analysis procedure for assessment documentation of the structural engineering tract are provided. This work sets the stage for a department wide analysis of cognitive development assessment along specific subject matter threads.