Assessing Learning Gains Attributable to Curricular Innovations

This Evidence-Based Practice paper is motivated by industry’s identification of the lack of hands-on experience as one of the major competency gaps in engineering education. This need has led to the development of new engineering and technology curricula balancing theoretical knowledge with integrated hands-on experiences. While such curricula are a welcome development, less has been done to formally assess the learning gains specifically attributable to these new approaches. This paper describes a long-term project which has developed an innovative curricular model that provides students with hands-on skills highly sought by industry; as well as an accompanying standardized test to measure student achievement on the competencies spanned by the curricular innovation. It gives a formal summative evaluation of the curricular model; and describes a comparative study being undertaken to compare the learning gains achieved under the new curricular model with those attained by comparison groups studying the same content but without participating in the particular curricular innovation.