Biomedical Engineering (BME) is a new, multidisciplinary, and rapidly growing field, however, the BME Workforce suffers from limited ethnic and gender diversity. Despite the demand and growth of this new field due to its public health importance, only 4 out of the 107 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) nationwide offers a Bachelor's of Science (B.S.) in Bio-Engineering related fields. In order to contribute to a growing BME Workforce, HBCUs need to react and offer more degree-programs relevant to BME. At the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), an HBCU and the District's only public institution for higher learning, we have recently established a new, degree program: Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering (B.S. in BME) full-board approved in Fall 2014, with program activities initiated in Fall 2015. The educational goal of this program is to enhance the quality and diversity of the BME Workforce via student professional development, new and relevant BME courses, and BME scholarly activities (e.g., guest lectures and journal club sessions), ultimately to increase the number of ethnic minorities pursuing careers and degrees in BME. Through our program activities, we are aiming to meet the nation's demand to contribute to a diverse BME workforce, directed towards solving problems in human health. A secondary, but related goal, is to increase the diversity of STEM-related fields. This paper summarizes our initial, but encouraging, BME activity-related findings. However, this study will be longitudinal (on a multiple year time period) to observe the true outcomes of our initiative.
Improved services and client satisfaction are key aspects of independent evaluation consultants' practices. For evaluators to deliver the highestquality services possible, they should regularly monitor their performance as evaluators, as well as the satisfaction of their clients. The client feedback form (CFF) was developed to gather performance assessment and satisfaction feedback from evaluation clients. Focusing on both performance assessment and client satisfaction provides evaluators comprehensive feedback regarding their services that they can then use to identify strengths and weaknesses and make appropriate adjustments to their work. This chapter discusses the importance of performance assessment and client satisfaction in general and within the field of evaluation and reviews the development and field testing of the CFF. Implications and future directions for the CFF are also discussed.
Performance AssessmentWhen not applied to programs, the terms performance assessment, performance evaluation, and performance appraisal are most commonly used in business management settings. Applied to the business of evaluation, performance assessment techniques can be an important part of a comprehensive quality 95
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