Using The Design Paradigm As A Strategy For Curriculum Enhancement

Revisions in the criteria for accreditation of engineering programs by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), especially with regard to Criterion 3: Program Outcomes and Assessment, have the potential to significantly enhance engineering education. Several factors may inhibit these revisions from reaching this potential. Among these are the tendency of faculty to view assessment as means to the end of obtaining ABET accreditation and the recent tendency to view students as customers within a continuous quality improvement (CQI) paradigm. While neither viewpoint is entirely incorrect, when these perspectives dominate curriculum review, many of the advantages of true curricular assessment and quality improvement are lost. We believe it to be more advantageous to regard students as products within an engineering design and manufacturing paradigm when developing assessment and improvement processes for curricula. In this paper, we will show how we have used the engineering design paradigm, coupled with ABET requirements, to develop an assessment and feedback approach that maps performance criteria in such a manner as to allow timely intervention at an individual student as well as programmatic level. We will demonstrate how to decompose student learning outcomes into performance criteria at a resolution geared for intervention rather than just assessment. Finally, we will describe a Web-based knowledge management system called AEFIS (Academic Evaluation, Feedback and Intervention System) which manages the data in such a way as to maximize the ability to provide continuous quality improvement while minimizing additional faculty labor.