Understanding what "success" means in assessment [of engineering education]

The University of Colorado at Boulder\´s Integrated Teaching and Learning Lab (ITLL) opened in the USA in April 1997. ITLL is an innovative facility designed to encourage experiential, hands-on learning across all engineering disciplines. The setting was designed to strengthen the creative problem solving skills of students while working in a multidisciplinary team. The lab has anecdotally been a great success in its use so far, however a focused general assessment plan must be developed to understand the long term impact. In order to develop a general assessment plan for the ITLL program, one first needs to identify what needs to be assessed. The general discussion of this paper focuses on "what does it mean to be a successful engineering student?" In order to come up with a definition of success, the authors looked at many issues and studied many current assessment techniques reported in literature. This paper discusses the definition of success for engineering education programs.