Mary Besterfield-Sacre, PhD

Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Nickolas A. DeCecco Professor

Director, Engineering Education Research Center

148 Benedum Hall | 3700 O’Hara Street | Pittsburgh, PA 15261 P: 412-624-9836 C: 412-596-1779

mbsacre@pitt.edu www.engineering.pitt.edu/eerc

Assessment of Engineering Education Outcomes

My research area involves examining engineering education issues through the eyes of assessment. The work involves using primarily quantitative approaches and statistical modeling as well as mixed methods to study the impact of curricular innovations/pedagogies (e.g., model eliciting activities, flipped/ inverted classroom), and issues that affect engineering pathways (e.g., freshmen attitudes, gender/URM issues, K-12 STEM pipeline). As the figure below indicates, our team has been successful in acquiring NSF, Department of Education and private foundation funding to study engineering education and have readily and comprehensively published the work. The heart of the work involves using assessment techniques to investigate how and whether particular learning outcomes develop in engineering students under different contexts, and subsequently determining ways to improve this learning. Specifically, the work focuses on measuring process-oriented technical and professional skills (e.g., ethical reasoning, teamwork, innovation attributes, and more recently global competency/preparedness). Such process-oriented outcomes are often hard to measure as the focus of measurement is not on the product produced but rather on students engaged in performing aspects of that outcome (i.e., the process).

Technical Skills

Under prior funding on engineering problem solving and modeling, we have assessed how engineering students navigated problem solving and engineering modeling as evaluated through journaling and reflection, self-efficacy, and work sampling via personal digital devices given to students. More recently we have worked in the area of innovative design and entrepreneurship. We have developed measures to track innovativeness in engineering design. Complementary to this work, we developed a set of assessment tools to measure technical entrepreneurship in engineering education. It is through this work that we conducted a cross-institutional study with approximately 15 engineering schools measuring aspects of how engineering students develop entrepreneurship. This work is timely as innovation, entrepreneurship and the maker movement is coming to the forefront of education.

Professional Skills

Investigating certain professional skills has been the other aspect of my research. Through NSF and Department of Education funding, ethical understanding and teamwork skills were thoroughly investigated, resulting in new instruments for the engineering education community. More recently, we have been assessing the spectrum of international undergraduate engineering educational experiences. The NAE together with a growing number of engineering education researchers have underscored the need for U.S. engineering graduates to be capable of effectively collaborating across national boundaries as their professional practice is becoming increasingly global in nature. Our research team has worked with 14 different engineering schools to measure the impact of international studies on engineering students and their global preparedness.