Introduction

A concern across the field of education, as well as within engineering education, is the identification of effective instructional approaches. “Effective” can be defined in many ways, including increased learning gains, improved attitudes, and changes in the general appeal of a subject or topic to students. To determine the effectiveness of an approach, it is often necessary to measure changes in student constructs over time or to acquire a snapshot of students’ performances at a given point. In addition, teachers and researchers may be concerned with determining whether their approaches are equally effective across different student populations.

In engineering education, each of these assessment purposes receives increased emphasis at the program and student level owing to the existence of an accreditation board, ABET, Inc. (formerly known as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology or ABET; see www.abet.org/history.shtml). ABET, Inc. requests that each accredited program demonstrate that its graduating seniors have achieved a set of program outcomes that can be found at the referenced website.