Beyond measurement: Designing engineering outcomes to foster student achievement

This paper describes the design of a novel program-level assessment framework consisting of engineering student outcomes and associated developmental levels; this framework has been dramatically influenced by constituent input and the assessment structure and practices of Alverno College. The outcomes have been designed to explicitly address student development; each out-come has four associated developmental levels that describe student progress in achieving the outcome. The outcomes are designed to provide structure to the educational experience for both students and faculty, providing a common language that facilitates a focus on student achievement. To this end, the number of outcomes has been limited to eight and each outcome has a one or two word descriptive title. This paper describes the process used to develop the outcomes, the outcomes structure, and the initial experience of using the outcomes in the Fall 2005 semester.