Teaching engineering: The student’s perspective

When it comes to undergraduate education, there is concern at a national level of the quality of education. The influence of teachers and their approaches to teaching on student learning impacts the number of engineers we produce as well as the quality of those engineers. Yet it is not an easy task to assess instructional quality. Typically we measure teaching by end-of-course surveys, peer reviews, and other measures such as ABET criteria. But do these approaches get at what students expect of their teachers? A group of engineering students at the University of Texas at Austin felt that their perspectives on quality teaching were not heard and they wanted to open a dialogue on their instructional needs. They came into the College´s Faculty Innovation Center and asked how to conduct such a process. Basically these students wanted to help identify instructional challenges as well as possible solutions. This paper will describe a student process to scrutinize their learning. Specifically, they surveyed their peers and this paper provides results and well as their approach to dissemination of the findings.