2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

NSF-RED: Outcomes-Based Education is Necessary but Insufficient

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session II

There have always been challenges facing engineering education. Today’s challenges include preparing students to address complex socio-technical issues, managing the cost of a degree, navigating the increase of engineering knowledge, and how technologies are impinging on student learning. The National Science Foundation RED project at [redacted] University hypothesizes that addressing these issues can best be achieved by expanding individual pathways for students, enabling an engineering education that is broader and more intersectional with other disciplines.

To better align the difficult work needed to expand student pathways through a curriculum in the highly constrained structure of most engineering degree programs, the [redacted] RED project adapted the capabilities approach which asserts that development—individual, economic, and societal—occurs when individuals have the access to personally meaningful capabilities, real and accessible opportunities, they can convert into societally recognized achievements that have real value to the person. In this framework student opportunities are identified at multiple levels, from those required for all human thriving to those specific to engineering students. This opportunity set informs outcomes, which in turn have the potential to foster student achievements that are societally recognized. Adopting the capabilities approach shifted our internal perspectives beyond educational outcomes to the role that opportunities (capabilities) and achievements (functionings) play in education. As our RED project wraps up we have concluded that ABET’s outcomes-based approach limits the ability of engineering education to adapt to changing circumstances and times.

This poster compares the framework that underlies ABET to the capabilities approach, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of both. The ways that ABET-derived and capability-based frameworks intersect with the rest of the curriculum are highlighted, as is how the capabilities approach can be used to highlight barriers to pursuing a wider array of curricular pathways.

Authors

Dr. Alan Cheville Bucknell University [biography]

Alan Cheville studied optoelectronics and ultrafast optics at Rice University, followed by fourteen years as a faculty member at Oklahoma State University working on terahertz frequencies and engineering education. While at Oklahoma State he developed courses in photonics and engineering design. After serving for two and a half years as a program director in engineering education at the National Science Foundation, he took a position in electrical & computer engineering at Bucknell University. He is currently interested in engineering design education, engineering education policy, and the philosophy of engineering education.
Dr. Stu Thompson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3444-8503 Bucknell University [biography]

Stu is an associate professor and chair of the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, PA. While his teaching responsibilities typically include digital design, computer-related electives, and senior design, his focus
Dr. Rebecca Thomas http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-2426-4759 Bucknell University [biography]

Rebecca Thomas is the inaugural director for the Pathways Program at Bucknell University, where she oversees the rollout of Bucknell’s ePortfolio initiative. She is also an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She holds a B.S. and M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Louisville and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University.
Dr. Stewart Thomas http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5554-1475 Bucknell University [biography]

Stewart J. Thomas received the B.S. and M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky in 2006 and 2008, respectively, and the Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in 2013. He has served on the organizing committee for the IEEE International Conference on RFID series since 2014, serving as the Executive Chair in 2022, with research interests in areas of low-power backscatter communications systems and IoT devices. He is also interested in capabilities-based frameworks for supporting engineering education. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Bucknell University in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Lewisburg, PA USA.
Prof. Robert M Nickel Bucknell University [biography]

Robert M. Nickel received a Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the RWTH Aachen, Germany, in 1994, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 2001. During the 2001/2002 academic year he was an adjunct instructor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. From 2002 until 2007 he was a faculty member at Penn State University. Since the fall of 2007 he is a faculty member at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. While being a faculty at Bucknell he spent the 2010/2011 academic year as a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellow at the Institute of Communication Acoustics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. During the 2022/2023 academic year he was on sabbatical as a Guest Researcher at the Electronic Systems of Medical Engineering Department, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. Prof. Nickel's research interests include signal processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and engineering education.
Sarah Appelhans http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7313-3504 Lafayette College [biography]

Sarah Appelhans is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Studies at Lafayette College. She earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University at Albany (SUNY) where she conducted research on the cultural factors that contribute to inequalities in engineering. As a postdoc at Bucknell University, she was the resident ethnographer in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, exploring applications of Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach in engineering education. Her current book project, On the Bleeding Edge: Gender, Immigration and Precarity in Semiconductor Engineering, investigates the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, and immigration status among semiconductor engineers.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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