Assessing design by design: progress report 1

This paper is a first progress report of a National Science Foundation Assessment of Student Achievement project designed to develop and test assessments of the ABET student learning outcome of "an ability to design a system, component or process to meet desired needs." The overall strategy is to use the research on the nature and acquisition of expertise to guide the choice of assessment tools and then to embed those assessments in a course based continuous improvement loop to evaluate which work best to improve those learning outcomes. So far, the project, which began in June 2002, has yielded prototypes of four assessments and a precursor to a fifth. One of those tools, a multiple-choice test of declarative understanding of design process principles, has been refined and the current version (the third of four versions) exhibits both reliability and validity.