Outcomes Assessment > engineering

In 1996, the College of Engineering requested and received funds from the Assessment Council to begin a three-year project of program assessment in which the LEAD Center would work with college faculty in gathering data from students, alumni, and employers on the effectiveness of the college�s undergraduate degree programs.[1] Information regarding assessment activities from these first three years is available in the �College of Engineering Report on 1996-1998 Projects and Proposal for 1998-1999 Activities.�

Over the past four years, each department completed at least one round of assessment and has developed some understanding of its role in program planning. This past year the college began moving forward with developing long-term assessment plans, including preparing for the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) site visit in the year 2000. Listed below are the four primary activities the college engaged in with regard to assessment:

These activities were carried out by College of Engineering Director of Assessment and the COE Assessment Team.

In order to carry out a variety of assessment activities, the COE convened a team to organize the college�s assessment and accreditation efforts. Each major within the college was invited to name one member to the team, which also included Dr. Sarah Pfatteicher, Director of Assessment, and Associate Dean Michael Corradini of the COE Academic Affairs Office, as well as Jennifer Kushner. The duties of the faculty team members are:

3) to coordinate the course and department assessment efforts to obtain a college-wide assessment.

Dr. Pfatteicher and Ms. Kushner provided assessment expertise and consulting to the team, and Dean Corradini assisted with selecting and coordinating the team members. Over the past two years, the team has met regularly during the academic year and will continue to do so until the accreditation site visit by ABET in November 2000.

Details of the work of the Curriculum Assessment Team are available in past reports to the Assessment Council. The sections below describe COE activities over the past year that were proposed to and funded by the Assessment Council.

In cooperation with the COE Accreditation Team, we continued to develop the college�s assessment and accreditation plans in anticipation of the college�s ABET visit in November 2000. Two main activities dominated the past year. One was the finalization of assessment packages with each degree program in the college, helping programs to make decisions about which tools they plan to use on an ongoing and regular basis. The other was our work with these programs to prepare their Self-Study Reports, which are the reports of campus information and activities that are required by ABET. The reports, which include descriptions of the assessment plans, are being polished now and will be delivered to ABET by July 1, 2000. Copies of the reports will be available after that time.

On November 23, 1999, we shared with the other schools and colleges on campus the web-based Course Description Page form we have developed with the COE Accreditation Team. This web-based data-entry form prompts faculty to respond to 11 key questions describing their courses. The questions ask about such topics as course objectives, classroom assessment mechanisms, and topics covered. The COE webmaster has prepared the necessary programming and CGI script for this form and has offered to help other interested schools, colleges, and departments adopt similar pages for their use.

We also have completed a major revision of our web site (now available at http://www.engr.wisc.edu/weel) and are continuing to update and expand the resources available here. The site is intended both to organize the various accreditation activities going on in the COE and to serve a broader audience, both on campus and beyond, by providing access to information and resources on a variety of assessment-related issues.

The web site is one of the first outward signs of a transition that is taking place in the COE. The COE assessment office is being re-formed as the Wisconsin Engineering Education Laboratory. The lab will continue to house and oversee much of the assessment work in the college, but will also be addressing broader (but related) educational issues, including curriculum and faculty development.

With ABET preparation well underway, the college overall has demonstrated its commitment to assessment. COE has implemented a number of assessment-related activities that could potentially be of use to schools and colleges across campus, and we are eager to continue to share the tools we have developed and the lessons we have learned. One of these lessons is that although faculty members are ideally the ones who will develop and use tools such as alumni surveys, it is often staff members who are the ones to administer those surveys. For the coming year, we would like to focus our efforts on helping these faculty and staff work together as they carry out their assessment plans.

We plan to organize a brown bag/professional development series building on the Program Assessment Tool Kit developed for the Assessment Council in 1998. The purpose of these meetings is first, to ensure that faculty and staff are both aware of the goals and challenges of the assessment plans that have been adopted, and second, to help both groups develop the knowledge and skills to carry out those plans. In all three phases described below, we will be working primarily with staff members in each department, but with the expectation that those staff members are in regular, close contact with their department faculty.

Phase 1: July-October 2000

During the first phase of these meetings, we will focus on using the tool kit to record the many decisions and plans that have been made by departments over the past year. In many cases, these plans are in the heads and computers of faculty members, but have not been shared in detail with the staff members who will carry out crucial parts of the plans. Over the first four months of the project, we will work with faculty and staff to document their plans in a departmental version of the tool kit. In short, the tool kit will be annotated to include a record of departmental decisions about the purposes and parameters of the department�s plan and will contain copies of actual tools being used by the department. This phase is scheduled to end just before the ABET site visit in November so that the ABET evaluators can use the annotated tool kits during their visit.

Phase 2: November 2000-April 2001

During the second phase of these meetings, we will return to the tool kit with the staff members who are conducting surveys and interviews and will provide them with additional background reading on each phase of the assessment process. Approximately once a month we will host a meeting for these staff members at which we will discuss both the tool kit and the background reading we have provided. In addition, we will be available for one-on-one consultations as staff members carry out the departmental assessment plans. By the conclusion of phase 2, each staff member will have completed one complete data-collection cycle of selecting, creating, and administering a tool.

Phase 3: May-June 2001

During this final stage, we will bring faculty more closely into our meetings as they and the staff members prepare for the final stages in the assessment cycle: analyzing and using the data that has been gathered. We will work with both groups to make the all-important transition from data collection to data use.

[1] For additional information on the LEAD Center and its Assessment Council-funded activities, see the LEAD Center Report to the Assessment Council, dated May 1998.