2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As universities invest in engineering leadership development programming, a significant challenge is evaluating the success of the programs. This paper will describe a new program evaluation framework that has been developed for co-curricular programming in the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (ILead) at the University of Toronto. The framework applies best practice for instructional design, articulating clear learning outcomes and mapping them to specific activities and interventions, with appropriate tools and artefacts to measure students’ reaction, learning, behaviour, and results.

The evaluation framework was tested on the Summer Fellowship program, a three month co-curricular program for student club leaders who are working on a change project for their club. Fellows were asked to self-evaluate against the learning outcomes in pre- and post-surveys using 5-point Likert scales and open ended questions. The student surveys were complemented with coach surveys based on the observable behaviours of their students for each learning outcome.

The results showed gains across all learning outcomes assessed and provided useful information that will be used to tune the program and the survey instruments in the future. The program evaluation framework is now being rolled out across all the co-curricular programs of ILead.