| Assessment, evaluation, and continuous improvement of the engineering education system are necessary to fulfill the changing needs of industry. This importance has been demonstrated through the new ABET criteria for engineering education system self-evaluation and by a call for research in engineering education assessment methodologies. This research provides a customer-based approach to measuring the education delivered to students and offers a model of the engineering education system that may be used for continuous process and product improvement. A conceptual model of the engineering system was created through literature review and focus groups consisting of practicing engineers. Based on the processes and product outcomes of the model, a measurement tool was developed, tested, and sent to industrial engineering graduates of the University of Pittsburgh. From the questionnaire responses, a set of key measures that describe the processes was derived using factor and regression analysis. Using regression analysis, the key process measures were then mapped to the product outcomes to determine their relationships. From the results, it was found that alumni with pre-graduation experience differed from alumni without pre-graduation experience by how they perceived the educational processes and by how they rated various aspects of the system. These differences were incorporated into the model. Despite the inherent variation in the system, the model was successful at identifying several relationships between the processes and product. The model and measurement tool developed, and the processes, products and relationships derived in this research, provide a basis for establishing a process control system for engineering education. |
