2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The capstone design engineering course at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College is a two-term, project-based course sequence that involves industry and non-profit projects and professionals. The course addresses all seven ABET learning outcomes through lectures, workshops, team work, and individual assignments and culminates in a group-based final presentation and written paper. In addition to the project experiences, students complete several professional development activities intended to increase their understanding of various topics integral to the engineering profession, including economics, ethics, safety, social context, and technical communication.

As part of their professional development, students were asked to develop their own performance assessments. At the beginning of the course, students were asked to design a series of activities they could complete in one month’s time in the categories of social/emotional, technical/instructional, and experiential/hands-on. Students were then asked to develop a plan to accomplish these goals and then evaluate their performance based on their identified goals. To measure change in confidence, students were asked to complete a pre- and post- assignment survey based on the validated SICKS instrument. Additionally in the post-assignment survey, students were asked to rate their improvement toward ABET outcomes 5 and 7.

Results indicate that aggregate evaluation showed a trend towards the mean. Results evaluated by gender showed that male students tended to lose confidence and non-male students tended to gain confidence. Only one question of the 15 question SICKS confidence instrument, during aggregate evaluation, showed statistical significance. Overall the majority of students rated their abilities, as defined in ABET 5 and ABET 7, as somewhat or much better following the assignment. Improvements to the method are discussed. Future research should include data analysis by race as well as gender.