A summative assessment strategy for a multi-institutional, multi-task project: the case of the manufacturing engineering education partnership

In 1994, a unique partnership of universities Penn State, University of Washington and University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez-in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, received funding from the ARPA Technology Reinvestment Program (TRP) to develop a new, practice-based curriculum and physical facilities for product realization and manufacturing. This initiative is named the Manufacturing Engineering Education Partnership and its overall outcome is the development at each participating institution of what we call The Learning Factory. This paper describes the project´s summative assessment strategy being implemented project-wide that will allow interested parties to evaluate the project´s performance and achievement of goals and objectives. It describes the project´s four major tasks and deliverables, the assessment plan and its principal elements. It also presents the assessment schedule and the tools used for qualitative evaluation. The assessment scheme depicted in this paper could be used as a model for similar multi-institutional, multi-task projects