Developing and assessing statewide competencies for engineering design

Journal of Engineering Education, Apr 1998 by Trevisan, Michael S, Davis, Denny C, Crain, Richard W, Calkins, Dale E, Gentili, Kenneth E

One of the major goals of TIDEE is to conduct professional development activities to enhance the instructional capability of engineering faculty in the state with regard to design education. This is accomplished through regional workshops. Workshop participants develop design projects, model team building, and structure assessments for the projects. Twenty-three workshops have been conducted with participation by 220 faculty from 78 institutions across the state and nation.

A second goal of TIDEE and a key outcome of the workshops is to define design competencies sought during the first two years of engineering education in Washington. The workshops provide a forum to begin this task and to develop and refine design curriculum. This process starts by questioning faculty regarding their own design expectations and comparing this information across faculty. Competencies from each group of faculty are documented and presented to the same and other faculty for scrutiny and feedback To date, a sample set of 28 design competencies has been developed for design in the first two years.4

Competencies were further refined by categorizing them relative to the design process. As a result, faculty developed eight process categories, which provide structure and organization for the competencies. These categories include information gathering, problem definition, idea generation, evaluation and decision making, implementation, communication, teamwork, and process improvement. Example competencies for the teamwork category are listed below:

exhibit cooperation and commitment to team success

identify team roles and responsibilities required for a specific team activity or project

identify insights that lead to improved team performance

The task of refining competencies continues today, building upon the work of previous faculty, and steadily honing the competencies into a stable and accepted set of statewide design expectations. (See reference 4 for a complete listing and description of the design competencies.)

Statewide communication regarding curricular issues is fostered through the Washington Council for Engineering and Related Technical Education (WCERTE), which has been in existence for over 25 years. WCERTE is a group of representatives from each institution in the state with responsibility to teach engineering and engineering technology courses. In the fall of 1996, WCERTE endorsed the need for design as developed through the TIDEE effort in the first two years of engineering education.5 In short, Washington state now has a core set of design expectations for all engineering students regardless of the institution from which a student originates.

IV. ASSESSMENT PROCESS

The actual process for developing the assessment system used for this project includes faculty appointment to an assessment task force, item and task development, administration, and scoring. Each of these aspects is discussed below.

A. Assessment Task Force

To guide the development of the assessment system an assessment task force was selected from the WSU engineering faculty.