A Worksheet For Planning The Assessment Of Engineering Education Proposals

The Problem: In proposing curricular innovations, engineering educators typically focus on the details of the new subject matter or pedagogical strategy that they are proposing to undertake, without concrete discussion of why they want to do it or of the gains that they expect to realize. A proposed curricular change, however, is fundamentally a claim that the change will improve the situation in some way—students will be better equipped to succeed in follow-on courses, for instance, or will like the material better, or will be more effective as professionals. Such curriculum proposals also can fall short in two related areas: failure to ground the claim in the pedagogical literature and failure to express the claim in a way that supports assessment of its success or failure. Without an explicit statement of the claim being made, supported by a statement of the instructional theory being invoked and expressed in terms of concrete, observable, measurable outcomes, an effective assessment plan for the proposal cannot be designed (until you say clearly what you are trying to do, no one can judge whether or how well you did it). And given the current climate, without a well-designed assessment component a proposal is unlikely to be successful.