Integrating Education Students In The Assessment Of Engineering Courses

Most engineering educators have several engineering degrees and no education degrees. This situation leads to well-meaning instructors without the knowledge necessary to most effectively teach their students. Meanwhile, education students frequently lack opportunities to apply assessment techniques learned in their classes. A collaboration between engineering and education faculty and students has recently been initiated at the University of Arizona to address these disconnects. This collaboration seeks to improve how engineering courses are taught and to improve the education of preservice teachers. A preservice teacher is a student learning how to be a K-12 teacher. The focus of this collaboration is the assessment of student learning in engineering courses (and the concurrent improvement of these courses). Preservice teachers conduct the assessment as part of their coursework. The preservice teachers are charged with (1) improving the assessment of student learning in an engineering course and (2) suggesting pedagogical changes to the engineering course based on their observations and the assessment results. This collaboration was first implemented in fall 2003 with 6 preservice teachers assessing the first-year Introduction to Engineering course. The goal of the program is to benefit both engineering students through improvements of their classes and education students through a hands-on opportunity to learn about analytic assessment of students in science and math classes. In this paper, the structure of this collaboration is examined and lessons learned from the first semester of its implementation are discussed.