Work in Progress – An Engineering Economy Concept Inventory

It is not easy to demonstrate increases in learning of course concepts as a result of new teaching methodologies since reliable and valid tools for assessing learning are not readily available for many curriculum areas. While there are a number of accepted concept inventories available for some engineering topics including statics and dynamics, heat and energy, signals and systems as well as statistics, we are not aware of any for engineering economy. This paper will discuss work in progress on the Engineering Economy Concept Inventory (EECI) which can be used to assess learning in any introductory engineering economy course. It was originally developed in 2009 for use in assessing the effectiveness of model-eliciting activities in the classroom and has since been revised and reformulated a number of times. In the fall of 2015 the EECI was given to two large sections of an engineering economy class both at the beginning and end of the course. It was the presented at a professional conference in the summer of 2016 and revised based on an analysis of the results of the 2015 implementation as well as input from engineering economy educators. In the fall of 2016, the EECI was again given to two large sections of an engineering economy class and these results are analyzed to determine its reliability and validity for assessing learning in engineering economy. In this paper we will discuss these results and plans for further study and distribution of the inventory.