Evaluating student mastery of design of experiment

Although ABET Outcome 3b explicitly requires engineering graduates to demonstrate "an ability to design experiments," engineering curricula rely heavily on cookbook experiments, in which students simply follow a sequence of steps in the form of a recipe and arrive at a predetermined result. Cookbook experiments do not require design by the students and therefore do not draw upon the critical thinking skills that lead to deeper learning. Using a fairly general process to guide students in the design of experiments, the authors have developed an instructional rubric to both assess student mastery of the design steps and help students understand the goals and expectations of the process. Laboratory experiences in aerospace, civil, and chemical engineering have been redesigned to allow more student-directed and student- designed inquiries, and are being used to pilot the application of the rubric.