2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In 2017, ABET published a revised list of student outcomes detailed under ABET General Criterion 3, which replaced outcomes (a) through (k) with outcomes (1) through (7). The revised student outcomes place greater emphasis on measuring students’ ability to consider a wide range of factors in engineering situations and to be able to communicate and work with a wider range of stakeholders. Outcome (3) is like the previous criterion’s outcome (g), which requires that students have “an ability to communicate effectively”. This paper describes an assessment method for the current ABET student outcome (3), which assesses “…an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences.”
The capstone project sequence at is well-suited to assess students’ ability to communicate with a wide range of audiences due to their interactions within a team, with a customer, and the general public at the conclusion of their project. To complicate the assessment, ABET requires each program to be assessed independently without data from students of different majors, even when students with multiple majors take the same course. 's emphasis on the use of multidisciplinary teams drawn from multiple engineering programs and interacting with a wide variety of people including the public makes this an ideal opportunity to assess outcome (3), but it also complicates the disaggregation of data.

The assessment tools presented in this paper use faculty advisor evaluations to measure key elements of communication for outcome (3) in a multidisciplinary industry-sponsored design and build project. These elements include Clarity & Audience Focus, Organization, Presentation Mechanics, Visual Aid Usage, Professionalism, Style, and Format. This assessment tool disaggregates team performance data to determine an independent metric for each program major while preserving the multidisciplinary nature of the capstone projects. Data from the capstone sequence at is used to demonstrate these methods. The result of the methods detailed in the paper is a clear, stable, and independent metric that can be used to assess outcome (3) for each program major in a multidisciplinary capstone project.