A Summative Evaluation of an Introductory Engineering Course

Identifying course objectives in accordance with the needs and expectations of students and industry with a focus on both efficiency and sustainability has been a challenge for engineering programs. The gravity of this complicated issue arises in designing the introductory courses to familiarize students with the profession as well as introducing the content of the successive years. Within this respect, we conducted an evaluation project at Sabancı University on the curriculum of an introductory course in industrial engineering. This study reports the findings obtained on content organization and alignment of learning outcomes with the main goals of the course. We adopted convergent parallel mixed method in which quantitative and qualitative data are collected and analyzed separately through content analysis and descriptive statistics (Creswell, 2014). We collected data from multiple qualitative (i.e., semi-structured interviews and document analysis) and quantitative sources (i.e., surveys and objectives alignment scale). Our results suggest that this introductory level course comprises rather theoretical and complicated subjects. Agreeing upon the complexity of the course content and incongruence of learning outcomes with the course goals, the lecturers recommended introducing more conceptual but less methodological topics.

Atmacasoy, A., Ok, A. & Şahin, G. (2018). An evaluation of Introduction to Industrial Engineering course at Sabancı University using CIPP Model. Proceedings of Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD). http://research.sabanciuniv.edu/36148/1/EESD2018Proceedings_Atmacasoyetal_IIE.pdf