Preparing for professional practice: course evaluation and implications

One goal of engineering schools is to prepare students to become engineering practitioners. At the University of Washington, we have been conducting a variety of research projects devoted to the concurrent goals of (a) articulating what it means to prepare students to become engineering practitioners, (b) assessing students' preparedness for being engineering practitioners, and (c) designing and evaluating activities that promote student preparation in areas that are potentially overlooked in traditional curricula. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of a two-credit course designed during the summer of 1999 and taught during the fall of 1999. In particular, we describe the motivations behind the course design, the primary components of the course design, and the outcome of an empirical and extensive student-based evaluation of the course. In addition, we discuss the possible implications of the evaluation results.