The Assessment of Leadership Outcomes in Capstone Projects Using Anonymous Peer Feedback

Assessing the leadership abilities of engineering students for the purposes of accreditation and outcomes assessment is a particularly challenging task. For a few students, clear evidence of leadership will exist. These students naturally take on leadership roles within their teams. They have the complete confidence and support of their teammates. The team functions as a cohesive unit. In such a situation, an instructor can easily recognize the quality of leadership provided but may struggle with quantitatively assessing the leadership abilities exhibited. In other cases, students arguably possess leadership abilities yet fail to demonstrate their abilities in a way that can be assessed by an instructor. Such students might demonstrate leadership within their team by taking on an undesirable task or by taking on a disproportionate share of the workload. If a student perceives that leadership is not required, a student might demonstrate great leadership by not taking on an obvious leadership role. Peer feedback can help an instructor identify such examples of leadership. To enable proper assessment of leadership abilities, a suitable environment must be created such that all students have a natural opportunity to demonstrate their leadership skills in their own way. Such an environment is often created by a capstone project. Given the scope of a capstone project, all team members typically have several opportunities to take on a leadership role and/or demonstrate leadership. The challenge is to assess leadership quantitatively without forcing a change in the behaviour of the students. This paper examines the design and implementation of an anonymous peer feedback survey for the purpose of quantitatively assessing different measures of teamwork and leadership abilities in engineering students. This paper describes the challenges that are associated with such an assessment process. This paper also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed assessment technique.