TIDEE FEEDBACK
Profile of an Engineer
Strengths
Valid and accurate list of attributes by practicing engineers – validated by large numbers
Great deal of detail, non-trivial items listed
Complete and comprehensive listing
Key actions all start with verbs
Specific name for each attribute à focus
Improvements
May be too long to get hands around, especially at first contact à collapse to fewer than 12 categories (easier navigation)
Collapse some of the items under ‘Technically competent’ because some of these are lower level, i.e. use of mathematics…
Structuring of list à visual for quicker, more powerful communication
IDEA #1: concentric circles with individual, team, organization, society levels…
IDEA #2: path leading to end state, show sequencing of emphasis in curriculum
Efficiency is very important in industry à highlight this in decision maker, idea generator, and technically competent
List is intimidating… Videotape engineers in practice, illustrating that all have room to grow
Instead of “complies” use “embraces” in principle-centered
Insights
How much professional development can honestly be taken on in undergrad programs?
Fitting in the curriculum is daunting.
If you try to prioritize categories from business perspective you get a different order...
Results oriented, business aligned, technically competent, team worker à gets fuzzy next
Some business leaders would rank socially conscious at the bottom
What’s wrong with expecting some of these skills to occur outside engineering curriculum?
Give the core curriculum it’s due.
Use to bring out diversity in discipline based on diversity in the class.
Best taught in a spiral where these skills are revisited.
Performance Areas/Factors
Strengths
Rubric provided to measure movement & growth across the curriculum
Performance areas/factors map well to types of things we are used to in classroom
Scales describe a clear growth pattern, mapped to all factors
Many of the items reflected skills versus specific knowledge items
Tool can be used for program level assessment as well as classroom assessment
Tool can be used to study life-long learning
Describes what is necessary to develop the “whole” engineer
Uses engineering language in descriptions
Improvements
Distinguish between understands and deeply understands at different points in scale
(best not to use “understanding”)
Define all six levels, especially if scale is not linear
Use more positive language on lower end, giving students credit for what they can do
(for example, engineering candidate often likes make and working with their hands)
Consider using ‘minimum exposure’ versus ‘lacks knowledge’
Eliminate redundancy among engineering science items and basic math & science
(these buckets may be too big)
Levels may be too coarse for use within one course
Consider how to better align scales with sciences of learning (for soundness) as well as current course structure (for familiarity)
Look for threads (process knowledge) versus chunks (content)
Add “societal leader” as 7th level ài.e. William Wulf, Hewlett & Packard, Dean Kamen
Upper end of scale for various scales goes beyond what is stated
Insights
Broad spectrum of things industry is interested in versus what we tend to focus on in school
There could be more alignment in language between the profile and the rubric,
i.e. attributes correlate to performance areas, key actions correlate to performance factors
For junior level performance (level 3) communicate average of maximum expectation versus minimum expectation
Whenever you map performance to a level in the curriculum you don’t create an incentive to excel beyond that level; be careful mapping levels to points in the curriculum
Provides a framework for building tools specific to different courses, preserving alignment across the program