Desiging the Pathways of Engineering Alumni Research Survey (PEARS)

Surveys of engineering alumni are a common approach taken by departments to collect evidence demonstrating how educational objectives are being met for the purpose of continuous improvement of the program (ABET Criterion 4). Whi le survey administration tools have become widely available and easy to navigate, resea ch rs must still address the challenges of designing not only a concise survey instrument but also an effective deployment plan that results in a high response rate among targeted respondents. To explore these issues in a real world context, th is paper draws upon first hand experiences related to the planning of the Pathways of Engineer i g Alumni Research Survey (PEARS) which was piloted with geographically distributed enginee ring alumni from four institutions in fall 2011. Creating the PEARS deployment plan parallele d th design of the instrument itself. This paper speaks to the unique logistical consideration s of deploying an alumni survey with respect to subject recruitment, incentives, alumni associat ion partnerships, and scalability. The preliminary findings outlined here are intended to inf rm the redesign of the deployment plan for future administrations of PEARS as well as to serve as a practical resource for other researchers wishing to survey engineering alumni.