RECONCILING GRADUATE ATTRIBUTE ASSESSMENT WITH EXISTING

OUTCOME-BASED ASSESSMENT

Diane Kennedy, Kumi Abercrombie, Martin Bollo, and John Jenness

BCITCEEA 2014

BCIT Background

• Civil, Electrical and Mechanical accredited engineering programs

• Approximately 600 students enrolled across all programs

• Evolved from technology programs, with existing strong roots

• Practitioner-focused engineering graduate

Outcome Based Assessment

• Roots in culture of outcome based assessment -> defined learning outcomes

• Approximately 1700 defined across all three programs

• 5- 12 outcomes per course

What is a Learning Outcome?

Learning Outcomes vs. Graduate Attributes

• Learning outcomes indicative of course goals• Indicators of graduate attributes measure

program performance• Claim: There should be a direct line of sight

from a course learning outcome to one or more graduate attributes

Breaking it down

• Learning Outcomes contain explicit and implicit statements of competency of graduate attributes

• Course assessment tools developed to measure student attainment of Learning Outcome

• Need to extract data from the course assessment tools to measure Program ability in developing the graduate attributes

Mapping LO to GA

CIVL 7090 Course Learning Outcomes

CEAB Graduate Attributes1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Design a civil engineering project from conception through to a completed plan. X X X X X X X X X X X X

Integrate information, ideas and concepts from previous courses into a comprehensive design effort.

X X X X X X X X X X

An Example. One LO: Many Indicators of GA.

Level of Mastery Grad AttribIndicator

Ref. #

Below Expecta

tions

Developing

Competent

Proficient Exceeds Expectati

ons

COMPONENT LEVEL: 1 2 3 4 5

Report Appearance: General appearance, Title page, Table of Contents, disclaimer

Executive Summary 7.1.2Writing Skill: organization, spelling, grammar, clarity, conciseness

7.1.2

Visual aids: figures, tables

7.3.1

Reflections

We had 7 faculty members align existing assessment tools (designed for LO assessment) with indicators of graduate attributes for the purpose of data collection. – Some components of the assessment could not

be mapped to an indicator.– Some components mapped to multiple

indicators.

Ideas for moving forward

• Categories represent ‘leading indicators’?• Faculty can provide new indicators

Example: Design

QUESTIONS?