Methods of assessing student learning in capstone design projects with industry: A five year review

Abstract

The benefits of company sponsored student design projects, both to academia and to industry, have been well established recently in symposia and in publications. However, assessing these benefits in order to improve the students' experiences can be difficult. This paper discusses techniques of assessment used to improve student learning over the past five years in capstone design courses at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. The student teams work together to create solutions to design problems defined by companies. These projects are "owned and managed" by the student teams with company contacts providing appropriate data and information and with faculty serving as advisors only. Mistakes made by the teams therefore are sometimes inevitable but this is considered to be pedagogically an important lesson in design. The students must interact not only with their company but also with their team mates in order to accomplish team goals. The assessment of these important interactions and the resulting changes to the courses are discussed. Traditionally, design reports alone have been the method by which the students' performance is judged in typical capstone design courses. However, this limits the ability of the faculty to determine the students' interaction with their companies and also with their peers. The desire to evaluate teaming skills as well as technical competence led the authors to investigate different approaches for assessing student learning. In this paper, the authors demonstrate the use of company evaluations, status reports, student self-assessments, peer reviews, and oral reports, as well as design reports to quantify student performance both as team members and design engineers. These methods will be discussed and examples presented showing how the results can be used to improve individual student performance on industrial design projects.