A systematic Web and literature search for instructional and assessment materials addressing EC 2000 program outcomes

The engineering accrediting body (ABET) has identified the skills and competencies in which engineering students are expected to be prepared by their engineering programs (EC2000, Criterion 3, a-k). These competencies include several often characterized as 'soft', open-ended, or non-traditional (i.e., communication, teaming, awareness of global and social impact, etc.), which the engineering faculty often profess feeling ill prepared to teach, and less prepared to assess, as classroom or programmatic outcomes. Typically, the traditional sources of engineering assessment tools and models (i.e., test suggestions from engineering texts, and examination problems borrowed and adapted from other faculty members) are poor in resources addressing the 'soft' ABET competencies. For these reasons a group of engineering educators and assessment and evaluation professionals from four NSF Engineering Foundation Coalition partner universities, undertook comprehensive, systematic Web and print literature searches, and a survey of first hand information about instructional and assessment materials being used to address the ABET a-k competencies. This paper confines itself to describing the methodology used and the results obtained in the systematic Web and literature searches. The paper discusses (1) the extent to which relevant instructional and assessment materials, for each particular ABET a-k category, were found to be publicly accessible online and in libraries; (2) the systematically cumulated impressions of investigators about the utility of the available materials; (3) the extent to which a-k instructional or assessment materials could be readily extrapolated from articles and presentation papers addressing ABET assessment; (4) the work undertaken to develop a Web-searchable, database of categorized and annotated references to refer engineering educators to appropriate and available materials; (5) the efforts to select, systematize and implement uniform methods for searching, documenting, classifying and compiling search information.