Structural Assessment To Support Engineering Education

The ABET 2000 changes in accreditation standards of engineering programs will soon make it necessary for engineering programs to demonstrate that their students have the knowledge and abilities necessary for performing professional engineering activities. Structural Assessment, a method for assessing students knowledge of the relationships among concepts, methodologies, and problems in a domain, may represent a valuable assessment resource. Past research shows that this assessment methodology can be valuable, but does not focus on how to make the methodology feasible for classroom use. In this paper, we describe how we created a suit of tools that support structural knowledge assessment for classroom use and a pilot evaluation of these tools that demonstrates the feasibility of such a method. 1. DEVELOPING ASSESSMENT PRACTICES FOR ENGINEERING EDUCATION