Development and Implementation of an Assessment Model in a Sophomore Electromechanical Systems Design Laboratory for the ETAC-ABET Accreditation

Abstract

In the field of assessment in higher education, practitioners regularly mention two features as key for success at implementing a sustainable assessment model, i) it has to be faculty-driven, and ii) it has to become part of the curriculum. This paper describes an assessment model incorporating these features. The model was developed and implemented for assessing both the ETAC-ABET Program Criteria for an associate degree in Electromechanical Engineering Technology program and the new ETAC-ABET (2019-2020) student outcome (2), which regards students' ability to design systems, components, or processes for well-defined engineering technology problems appropriate to the discipline. This paper describes the implementation of our assessment model, including a description of the performance indicators used for assessment of criteria mentioned above, the structure of course selected for the assessment, the details of the laboratory experiments and final design project used as assessment tools, a summary of the collected data and a discussion of the assessment results, and the arrangements we made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that our method of incorporating assessment as regular course activities helps achieve the ultimate objective of education, i.e., continuous and constant improvement of students' competencies and learning experiences.