The Department of Energy´s Technical Leadership Development Program: lessons learned from assessment and evaluation

Beginning in the spring of 1995, the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) contracted to provide an intensive 15-week educational program for interns from the Department of Energy´s Technical Leadership Development Program (TLDP). The program, called the “Applied Engineering Fundamentals Course” (AEFC), is designed to help the interns, the “best and the brightest” of the DOE´s new hires, to develop their interdisciplinary technical knowledge, teamwork skills, professionalism, communication skills and zest for lifelong learning. As an integral part of the TLDP, we have designed a program to both assess the intents and to evaluate the program being provided by CSM. We have used multiple measures, quantitative and qualitative, formative and summative, to evaluate and assess the course. In this paper, we discuss the unique problems involved in the assessment and evaluation of a program such as the AEFC and the solutions we have developed