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Assessment of Learning and its Retention in the Engineering Design Classroom Part A: Instrument Development

Okudan, G., Ogot, M., Zappe, S. and Gupta, S.

Abstract This paper describes the development of an engineering design knowledge assessment instrument. While, our ultimate goal is to prepare the environment and conditions that are most conducive for our students in teaching engineering design concepts, we often are unable to determine whether or not changes to the classroom environment have any impact on student learning due to a lack of validated instruments. Therefore, the overall purpose of this project is the development of a stable instrument designed to measure the impact of pedagogic changes and supporting classroom materials on student learning. This paper documents the rationale for developing a new instrument and describes its development process.

Introduction Assessment of students’ engineering design knowledge at various points during their engineering curriculum is very critical. This assessment might have many purposes including gaining an understanding on: 1) are most students able to meet the intended objectives for the course? 2) is the information retained after a period of time has elapsed? 3) what are the areas that students have the most difficulty learning? With similar purposes in mind our team has evaluated the literature to determine what instruments exist that are intended to measure engineering design knowledge and how these instruments have been used in other engineering schools. After our extensive review, we concluded that available instruments were not as comprehensive as we had hoped. Accordingly, we have teamed up with learning specialists and embarked on the development of a new instrument. This paper documents this effort.

In the paper, first we provide a summary of our investigation on the availability of knowledge assessment tools on design, and then provide details on the development of the new instrument, which we have named as CADEK: Comprehensive Assessment of Design Engineering Knowledge instrument.

Literature Review For continuous improvement of the engineering design education, both formative and summative assessments are needed6. Formative assessments provide feedback in the early stages of student’s design knowledge experience which helps to ensure the development of their capabilities. Summative assessments, on the other hand, provide a measure of the program impact on the student achievement, necessary for evaluating the full scope of engineering degree program.

There have been several engineering design knowledge assessment tools in the past, which have aided the engineering design educators, engineering educators and learning assessment specialists. In general, assessment tools should be designed in such a way that they are capable of capturing the whole learning process which the individual students go through within the team. According to Bailey et al. 2, most of the previous assessments relied on 1) team grades on design

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Okudan, G. (2007, June), Assessment Of Learning And Its Retention In The Engineering Design Classroom Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2717