Workshop - Using IDEALS to demonstrate development of professional skills in project courses

Professional skills are vital to preparing engineers for their careers, but how well do we teach and assess them in our professional programs? Many design faculty are unclear about the required skills, how to develop them, and how to assess them. In response to this need, the Integrated Design Engineering Assessment and Learning System (IDEALS) promotes professional skills in a semi-authentic community of practice found in team-based design project classes. This workshop outlines practical learning outcomes for professional skills, team-based active learning materials, and aligned assessment instruments for measuring growth in professional development. The IDEALS learning model is derived from learning and motivation theories and seeks to elevate student learning through reflective practice. This session will alternate between short presentations, opportunities to score student work, and group discussion. Participants will also examine how to report classwide results for ABET within IDEALS. This workshop is intended for faculty who teach project courses across all disciplines and for ABET coordinators from a broad spectrum of engineering programs. Index Terms – formative assessment, summative assessment, program assessment, professional development, life-long learning INTEGRATED DESIGN ENGINEERING ASSESSMENT AND LEARNING SYSTEM (IDEALS) The capstone engineering design course provides students an opportunity to create a product or process as well as the opportunity to improve professional skills and workplace behaviors. The latter are often difficult to teach and assess in a project-based course. To encourage students to be aware of, to prepare for, and to engage in project-based professional skill development, the Transferable Integrated Design Engineering Education (TIDEE) consortium developed the Integrated Design Engineering Assessment and Learning System (IDEALS) that supports varied uses of the assessment in different course settings [1]. Professional skills targeted by IDEALS include professional responsibility and an ability to pursue lifelong learning related to twelve specific abilities/attributes that are technical, interpersonal, and individual in nature [2]. The IDEALS professional developments assessments consist of a progression of two formative assessments (Professional Development Planning and Professional Development Progress) and one summative assessment (Professional Development Achieved) that are used to prepare for, monitor, and summarize student professional development during the capstone course [3]. A companion instructional module and scoring rubric is provided with each assessment instrument in an instructor-friendly web-based format that helps the instructor guide student development. IDEALS assessments have been implemented in a secure, web-based environment that contains the IDEALS assessment instruments, instructor and student interfaces, data archives, data processing, reporting functions, and companion instructional modules [4]. The instructor specifies the assignment by indicating which students are to receive the assignment, the due date for student completion, and the targeted date for receiving instructor feedback. Students complete the assessment assignments and receive feedback from the instructor online. Instructors are prompted to use a web-implemented version of the scoring rubric for each assessment and are provided comment boxes for writing additional feedback. The web system automates data compilation for instructor and student viewing. The assessment cycle is completed when students log back into the system to read feedback from the instructor.