Assessment of student achievement in engineering design is an important part of engineering education and vital to engineering program accreditation. Systematic assessment of design is challenging yet necessary for program improvement. Programs with design distributed across the curriculum and with significant numbers of transfer students face special challenges in assessing students' design capabilities and providing meaningful feedback to improve design education. This manuscript presents an assessment process that supports effective transfer of design credits, feedback for improvement of design education, and evaluation of program success in design education. Mid‐program and end‐of‐program assessment strategies are included. Design scoring standards are presented to establish a basis for making performance comparisons within and among programs.

This article presents the state of practice of evaluability assessment (EA) as represented in the published literature from 1986 to 2006. Twenty-three EA studies were located, showing that EA was conducted in a wide variety of programs, disciplines, and settings. Most studies employed document reviews, site visits, and interviews, common methodologies previously recommended in the literature on EA. The use of uncommon methodologies such as the use of standardized instruments and statistical modeling were also found in studies obtained for this review. The most common rationale for conducting EA mentioned in these studies was determining program readiness for impact assessment, program development, and formative evaluation. Outcomes found in these studies include the construction of a program logic model, development of goals and objectives, and modification of program components. The findings suggest that EA is practiced and published more widely than previously known. Recommendations to enhance EA practice are offered.

Improving Evaluation Quality and Use Michael S. Trevisan, Tamara M. Walser Evaluability assessment (EA) can lead to development of sound program theory, increased stakeholder involvement and empowerment, better understanding of program culture and context, enhanced collaboration and communication, process and findings use, and organizational learning and evaluation capacity building. Evaluability Assessment: Improving Evaluation Quality and Use, by Michael Trevisan and Tamara Walser, provides an up-to-date treatment of EA, clarifies what it actually is and how it can be used, demonstrates EA as an approach to evaluative inquiry with multidisciplinary and global appeal, and identifies and describes the purposes and benefits to using EA. Using case examples contributed by EA practitioners, the text illustrates important features of EA use, and showcases how EA is used in a variety of disciplines and evaluation contexts. This text is appropriate as an instructional text for graduate level evaluation courses and training, and as a resource for evaluation practitioners, policymakers, funding agencies, and professional training.

Electroencephalographic cortical event-related potentials (ERPs) are affected by information processing strategies and are particularly appropriate for the examination of hypnotic alterations in perception. The effects of positive obstructive and negative obliterating instructions on visual and auditory P300 ERPs were tested. Twenty participants, stringently selected for hypnotizability, were requested to perform identical tasks during waking and alert hypnotic conditions. High hypnotizables showed greater ERP amplitudes while experiencing negative hallucinations and lower ERP amplitudes while experiencing positive obstructive hallucinations, in contrast to low hypnotizables and their own waking imagination-only conditions. The data show that when participants are carefully selected for hypnotizability and responses are time locked to events, rather robust physiological markers of hypnosis emerge. These reflect alterations in consciousness that correspond to participants' subjective experiences of perceptual alteration. Accounting for suggestion type reveals remarkable consistency of findings among dozens of researchers.

Reliability and validity of multiple-choice examinations were computed as a function of the number of options per item and student ability for junior class parochial high school students administered the verbal section of the Washington Pre-College Test Battery. The least discriminating options were deleted to create 3- and 4-option test formats from the original 5-option item test. Students were placed into ability groups by using noncontiguous grade point average (GPA) cutoffs. The GPAs were the criteria for the validity coefficients. Significant differences (p c 0.05) were found between reliability coefficients for low ability students. The optimum number of options was three when the ability groups were combined. None of the validity coefficients followed the hypothesized trend. These results are part of the mounting evidence that suggests the efficacy of the 3-option item. An explanation is provided.