2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Motivation:
The Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at [University] has developed a Power Engineering Internship (PEI) program that provides engineering career development pathways within the electric utility industry. The PEI is supported by several U.S. Department of Energy grants that aim to develop quality career opportunities and develop a future electric utility workforce that represents the nation’s diverse populations.

The [University] ECE Department intends to use these surveys as assessment tools for its ABET accreditation process, in particular, the ABET Criteria 3 Student Outcomes (SOs). SOs relate to the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that students acquire as they progress through an engineering program ; they describe what engineering students are expected to know and should be able to do by the time they graduate.

Engineering education literature presents methods for using internships as means for assessing multiple SOs. Methods include using portfolios and reflection papers that derive from internship experiences as well as mapping survey responses from employers and interns to SOs. Such methods gain value as they are assessed over multiple years . However, the majority of this literature discusses assessment tools that were developed for the ABET 2000 Criteria 3 “a through k” SOs. Our motivation is to provide assessment tools that can be used to assess modern Criteria 3 SOs based on students’ internship experiences.

Methods:
The “a through k” SOs have been supplanted by new “1-7” SOs . Our team has developed an assessment method that allow us to measure the PEI program over several iterations of internships using a consistent set of tools. These tools inform project operation and provide metrics for tracking the progress of the program . They can also serve as an indirect ABET assessment method. We administer surveys to both the interns and their mentors at multiple points during the internship period. This approach provides insight into how the perceptions of the interns and mentors evolve over the internship period .

Surveys are a means of indirect assessment, which refers to using secondary data about students' experiences. These may be gathered from student self-assessments, graduation rate data, or employer feedback, for example. In contrast, direct assessment involves evaluation of students’ performance, such as through grading exams, laboratory reports, and project deliverables. Indirect assessments provide insights into perceptions of learning and program effectiveness, which may be particularly valuable if gathered from third parties, such as internship mentors. Using both indirect and direct assessments as part of an ABET evaluation process improves program assessment by diversifying the sources of metrics.

Assessment:
The intern and mentor surveys are organized into multiple categories of questions. Responses to questions either use a numerical Likert scale ranking or are open-ended and response-based. The categories include Sense of Belonging, Career Preparation, Professional Confidence, and Programmatic . Our full-length publication will discuss the categories, the questions within each category, how the questions map to Criteria 3 SOs, and present preliminary findings. Our PEI program began in January 2024 will be funded through 2030. During this period, we will collect and analysis survey results. These results will be used to improve the PEI program operation, improve survey administration, and contribute to our ABET assessment. Our team will follow up over the years with subsequent ASEE publications that report our assessment findings.