Engineering Cognition Lab

Although engineering educators implement many educational innovations to improve student achievement, few evaluate the impacts of their innovations sufficiently to support confident adoption of their innovations by others. A national panel of 30 engineering education and evaluation professionals has called for a national resource to enable effective evaluation of engineering education projects. This paper reports on the process and framework for creating a library of superior evaluation instruments, the ASSESS system, that supports scholarly innovation in engineering education. The overarching goal of the ASSESS project is to create and test the system, and engage the user community to position ASSESS resources for successful adoption and implementation. The project seeks to disseminate evaluation instruments and to build the evaluation capacity of the engineering education community for more effective evaluation of engineering education development projects. A team of engineering education and evaluation professionals and project consultants have established a framework for characterizing evaluation instruments, structuring a database, and creating a web interface that supports desired user functionality. Each instrument is characterized by a descriptive summary, applications to engineering education, underlying theoretical foundations, technical specifications (e.g., reliability, validity data), implementation features, and directions for accessing the instrument. Published information on the instrument and its testing are referenced. Instruments are described in ways sensitive to the needs of novice users as well as needs of evaluation experts.