Assessment Structure And Methodology For Design Processes And Products In Engineering Capstone Courses

To enhance learning as well as satisfy requirements mandated by ABET, engineering programs and faculty are increasingly investigating ways to teach and assess the technical and nontechnical outcomes set for students. Capstone courses provide an ideal place to assess these outcomes, as they typically address all or most of those listed in Criterion 3. With ongoing NSF support, the Transferable Integrated Design Engineering Education consortium (TIDEE) has been developing transferable assessment tools specifically for engineering capstone design courses. This work has produced a framework and cognitive model which outline the primary performance areas associated with capstones and provide an overarching structure of the assessment implementation strategy. The model represents the structure of a complete package of instruments that are valid for varied capstone courses, institutions, and faculty. Over the past few years, with this framework and model, TIDEE has designed, tested, and implemented several assessment instruments as part of this package. The work presented in this paper is a continuation of TIDEE’s effort, and describes the structure of the remaining assessment instruments to be developed – for design processes and resulting design products – along with a methodology for creation of these instruments.

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