Engaged engineering learning can help students develop social responsibility and civic awareness, provide real-world context for building technical and professional skills, improve students’ ability to understand needs, build capacity for interdisciplinary collaboration and promote lifelong learning. These learning outcomes map well to the college and ABET learning outcomes 1-7:
Examples of outcomes:
- Students will be able to use engineering principles to analyze community-identified problems (ABET 1, solve complex problems), design solutions that meet community needs while considering constraints (ABET 2, apply engineering design) and gather or interpret relevant data to support engineering judgment (ABET 6, ability to analyze and interpret data).
- Students will be able to engage with community stakeholders to define engineering design requirements rooted in actual community challenges (ABET 2) and evaluate the societal implications of potential solutions (ABET 4, ethical and professional responsibility in societal contexts).
- Students will be able to explain the ethical, professional, and societal implications of engineering decisions, demonstrating an awareness of how engineering solutions impact communities and relate to broader societal challenges (ABET 4).
- Students will be able to work effectively in diverse, interdisciplinary teams and foster inclusive collaboration (ABET 5, ability to function on a team) while acquiring and applying new knowledge as needed for complex, evolving community problems (ABET 7, ability to acquire and apply new knowledge).
- Students will be able to evaluate their project work, articulate lessons learned, and apply reflective insights to future professional practice (ABET 7, continuous learning), while also considering ethical and societal implications as part of their reflection (ABET 4).
Examples of assessment methods:
- Students write structured reflections addressing societal and ethical implications of their engineering work. Faculty should develop a rubric ahead of time
- Faculty evaluate student design reports, project reports, presentations, prototypes, test data
- Faculty and community partners evaluate feasibility of student designs or other solutions and the responsiveness of these to community needs.
- Faculty and community partners evaluate feasibility of student designs or other solutions.
- Build and use a rubric to evaluate teamwork, planning, communication and leadership. May include peer feedback.
- Design and use structured reflections, see ASEE PEER for examples.