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Assessing Cooperative Education Through the Lens of ABET Outcomes By Gwen Lee-Thomas, Ph.D., Director of Assessment Arleen Anderson, Assistant Director of Career Services Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Terre Haute, Indiana

Introduction:

The purpose of the Rose-Hulman Cooperative Education (co-op) program is to provide the student with an opportunity to gain hands-on, discipline-specific experience that complements and supplements classroom theoretical instruction. Students are encouraged to establish objectives specifying significant and appropriate learning that is expected to result from the work experience. A successful experience is determined by the outcomes of the experience, not just for the experience alone.

Categories of learning objectives include: • Knowledge Acquisition • Intellectual and Functional Skill Development • Problem-Solving • Clarified Values

In addition to assessing the co-op experience through the lens of EC 2000, Rose-Hulman has been actively involved in the re-engineering of the freshmen and sophomore curricula to integrate courses designed around competences that are highly correlated with EC2000. These curricula were borne out of a National Science Foundation grant that currently funds the collaborating efforts of six institutions’ colleges of engineering to form the Foundation Coalition. Each institution has worked diligently to reform their freshmen and sophomore engineering curriculum, and in some cases, upper division curriculum. Rose-Hulman’s Foundation Coalition (FC) related curricula include the Integrated First-Year Curriculum in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (IFYCSEM) for freshmen students and the Sophomore Engineering Curriculum (SEC).

As a cooperative effort, the competencies measured in the integrated curriculum for freshmen and the sophomore engineering curriculum look at the same competencies as the co-op program which all fall within EC 2000. These include integration of subjects, teaming, communication, technology, problem-solving, and life-long learning. Therefore, this report looks at whether or not those students in the Foundation Coalition rate their co-op experience differently than those students who were not in either of the FC programs, and simultaneously, do employers rate the FC students differently than they rate the non-FC students.

To measure the effectiveness of the co-op experience for all Rose-Hulman students, the office of Career Services collects data on co-op students using four different instruments (1) Inventory of Abilities: Self Analysis Profile, (2) Co-op Student Evaluation, (3) Employer Cooperative Education Evaluation Form and (4) Student Essays.

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Anderson, A., & Lee-Thomas, G. (2000, June), Assessing Cooperative Education Through The Lens Of Abet Outcomes Paper presented at 2000 Annual Conference, St. Louis, Missouri. 10.18260/1-2--8172