Assessing students’ development of program outcomes in an associate degree engineering curriculum: a longitudinal observation

Abstract

Students' progress and development in an engineering program is often left unexamined when much of the attention is placed on benchmarking students' performance against absolute standards. This study aims at tracking students' development on program learning outcomes across a two-year associate degree engineering curriculum. Nine Likert-scale items were designed to measure students' perception of development on two clusters of program learning outcomes, namely 'Knowledge and Understanding of Engineering' and 'Awareness of Professional Ethics.' A total of 94 students in the associate degree engineering program filled in the questionnaire at first joining and graduating from the program. It was hypothesized that students perceived themselves to have developed in the two clusters of learning outcomes across the two-year study. Reliability tests suggest that the designed items are reliable measure of the two clusters of learning outcomes. Repeated measure MANOVA suggests that students perceive themselves to have some longitudinal gain in various program learning outcomes. Results support the value-addedness of program on students' academic development. Implication of self-reported measurement on curriculum design and revision will be discussed. © 2012 IEEE.