Best Practices In Implementing An Engineering Mid Program Assessment

Abstract

This paper outlines practices that ensure quality in administering, interpreting, reporting, and maintaining the 'Design Team Readiness Assessment' developed by the Transferable Integrated Design Engineering Education (TIDEE) consortium in the Pacific Northwest. A copy of the instrument can be downloaded from www.cea.wsu.edu/tidee. The instrument assesses design process, teamwork, and design communication skills in three different contexts. Previous work has demonstrated how to achieve high inter-rater reliability through explicit scoring criteria and decision rules. For this reason, the 'Design Team Readiness Assessment' can be used to evaluate the preparation of beginning and mid-level engineering and engineering technology students across institutions and degree programs. Faculty who have implemented the instrument have found it to be a valuable classroom tool, promoting self-awareness of life-long learning skills in a variety of course settings and supporting action research on lower-division design experiences. Their discoveries are summarized here using a framework for assessment literacy that is widely used in the K-12 education community.