Assessing Students’ Knowledge of Design Process in a Design Task

Today´s engineering educators widely agree that engineering curricula need to incorporate a larger emphasis on design. ABET has instituted the requirement that programs build continuous improvement loops around student learning outcomes, including the ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs. Success at this enterprise depends on having appropriate assessment tasks, ones that are manageable in the context of coursework and provide pointers toward improvement, yet are authentic. The most widely used way of assessing design skill is to give a design task, but the requirements to do so usually are too cumbersome to use in the context of a class. The paper will describe our struggles to create a procedure within a design task whereby we might assess students´ design process. This paper will describe the tasks, the findings obtained with them, and how they could be used within a continuous improvement loop