Page 110 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

THE ENGINEERING EDUCATION COALITIONS PROGRAM 93

implemented, and many have evolved into sustained, institutionalized
programs that have fostered the development of student learning
communities.

Assessment
The infrastructure to support assessments of curricular innovations,
especially on the scale implemented in many EEC projects, was virtu-
ally nonexistent when the EEC Program was initiated. The critical role
of assessment was recognized only gradually. The adoption of the new
Engineering Criteria by ABET in the mid-1990s was pivotal to the
near-universal recognition of the importance of assessment and stimu-
lated the development of an infrastructure to support assessments of
critical, nontraditional learning outcomes.
Every EEC invested substantial resources both to assess its initia-
tives and to support the further development of assessment instruments
and processes, such as Team Developer, the mining of student-informa-
tion databases, and concept inventories. However, despite the outcomes-
based ABET Engineering Criteria and efforts by the coalitions, the in-
frastructure for the assessment of critical capabilities (e.g., design,
problem-solving, lifelong learning) has not yet matured to the point of
supporting systemic reform in engineering education.

Faculty Development
In the beginning, faculty development did not appear on the action
agendas of the EECs. When the importance of faculty development was
recognized, about midway through the program, all of the EECs initi-
ated programs to address faculty development; subsequent assessments
of these programs suggest that they did have some effect. For example,
surveys of faculty by SUCCEED suggested that the value of active learn-
ing environments was more widely recognized.

THE SYSTEMIC REFORM LENS
In terms of systemic reform, the EEC Program yielded two signifi-
cant lessons. First, the dissemination of the results of engineering edu-
cation research and development is far more difficult than was initially
understood. Second, the culture of engineering education is sustained

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