ABET & Engineering Accreditation - History, Theory, Practice: Initial Findings from a National Study on the Governance of Engineering Education

Abstract

is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology. Her dissertation research, "Steel Toes and Ponytails: Gender and Belonging in Engineering", investigates the boundaries of membership in engineering in the Capital District of New York. She is honored to be a research assistant on the NSFsponsored study on engineering education reform entitled "The Distributed System of Governance in Engineering Education." In addition to her academic experience, she is a former mechanical engineer with several years of experience in the aviation and construction industries.

The Modalities of Governance in Engineering Education

“…Our first major work-in-progress report was presented last year at ASEE 2019 in Tampa, Florida and was on the development and implementation of ABET EC 2000 [1]. While ABET is a major part of what drives change in engineering education, we do not address accreditation directly in this paper.…”

“…At the broadest level, engineering education in the United States operates as a highly complex, dynamic, open system with extensive local variation. 1 The dynamic nature of the system can in large measure be attributed to the fact that engineering knowledge is commonly regarded as instrumental knowledge [12]. While much can be said about what this knowledge is instrumental for, this professional ownership of a sense of societal relevance leads to a shared understanding that engineering educators should always strive to adapt their knowledge to "changing times and needs."…”

“…Policy implications: Engineering educators and administrators need to be aware of the complexity of the institutional contexts within which they operate, and develop solutions adapted 1 Though there are elements of engineering education that appear to be obdurate structures at the broader scales of analysis (e.g. organizations), and these are obdurate in the sense that they often appear difficult to control and difficult to change, with a finer-grain analysis we can begin to unpack how agency-the capacity to bring about change-is distributed throughout the system.…”

Toward Continuous Improvement of EAC/ABET Criteria 3 and 5

“…Based on their input, quality control approaches such as Six Sigma, which focused on outcome assessment, shaped the development of a new generation of criteria, called Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC2000). Prior to this effort, outcome assessment was not widespread in K-12 or higher education, nor was it supported by regional accreditation organizations [25].…”

ABET's Maverick Evaluators and the Limits of Accreditation as a Mode of Governance in Engineering Education

“…On the other hand, the diffusion of the method into engineering education was also facilitated by a widespread interest in quality control among engineers and engineering educators during an era of broad concern about national competitiveness-this was a time during which there were many excited conversations about Japanese management, "Six Sigma", "Total Quality Management," and the like. Given the epistemic contiguity between educational assessment and their own knowledge of quality control processes, those who were placed in charge of implementing EC 2000 were quick to recognize that a focus on educational assessment was also about a commitment to continuous improvement [14].…”