Assessment of ABET Student Outcomes During Industrial Internships

The Paper Science and Engineering (PSEN) program at UW-Stevens Point has had a three-credit industrial internship requirement since 1973. We assessed this requirement through comprehensive student papers covering the technology of the pulp and paper industry and the processes and products of the mills in which students worked. This assessment worked well until roughly ten years ago, when mills began retaining the reports, saying that they contained proprietary information. At the time, faculty decided to share the rubric used to evaluate student papers with mill supervisors so that they would have a standard by which they could rate papers, as well as an evaluation form to provide feedback on student work in the mill. In 2010, we developed a new approach to assessing these internships. Taking advantage of the capabilities of the online course management system Desire2Learn ® , students now respond to 16 questions about their internship work while they are in the mills. These responses help students to remember activities performed during the entire internship. When they return to campus, students provide two pieces of work to satisfy academic requirements: reflection papers and electronic portfolios that document their internship work, specifically addressing how their internships helped them develop skills in several ABET Student Outcomes for the PSEN program. The portfolios provide evidence that the faculty can use to assess the achievement level for outcomes associated with these internships. In this paper, we describe the assessment method in more detail, and the conference presentation will include a demonstration of the technology. We also discuss the need for students to be able to more clearly identify and articulate achievement of learning outcomes. A critical finding of our initial study is that students often met learning outcomes without realizing they did, without understanding the importance of communicating that they did, or simply by not being able to effectively communicate that they did.