Longitudinal study of intellectual development of engineering students: What really counts in our curriculum?

In the early 1990's several national reports called for reform in engineering education and suggested that the current preparation of engineering students fell short of the skills and competencies that would be required of practicing engineers. Many engineering colleges across the country sought to address these problems with curricular reforms that incorporated more hands-on design work into the engineering curricula. The task of assessing the effectiveness of these design-infused curricula presents a critical challenge for engineering educators. At Penn State, we developed a longitudinal assessment program to evaluate the qualitative changes in students' thinking as they progressed through the engineering curriculum. This paper presents a summary of the results of the first longitudinal component of this assessment.