in the United States. We acknowledge the many contributions to
the literature on the assessment of engineering education that have
been reported in other venues, both within engineering education
and external to engineering education (pre-college educational re-
search, national studies, etc.). However, we have elected to limit our
discussion to articles published in JEE because of considerations for
the length of the paper and because JEE offers a rigorous review
process with an emphasis on engineering education. The purpose of
this article is not to present a comprehensive literature review about
assessment, but rather to highlight good practices within engineer-
ing education as reflected through JEE and to suggest some possible
future directions and challenges. Because of the central nature of as-
sessment to engineering education, several other articles in this issue
address assessment as a related topic.
The language of assessment can vary slightly from author to au-
thor. Therefore, we begin this discussion with a definition, taken
from Rogers and Sandos [2], of three key terms as they are used
within this paper. The term assessment is used here to refer to the act
of collecting data or evidence that can be used to answer classroom,
curricular, or research questions. In other words, we use the term
assessment in a broader sense than measuring individual student’s
competencies, such as scores on a classroom exam or homework as-
signments. Assessment methods are defined here as the procedures
used to support the data collection process and are an important
consideration in any educational research design. Evaluation,
which is often used synonymously with assessment, refers to the in-
terpretations that are made of the evidence collected about a given
question. A complete summary of the assessment terms and defini-
tions used in this paper appears in the Appendix.
In the next section, we provide a brief review of recent develop-
ments in the assessment of engineering education and reflect upon
the events that have inspired change. Events of interest include the
accountability mandates of the mid-1980s and recent changes in
the engineering accreditation process instituted by ABET. De-
pending upon the setting and the purpose of the assessment, dif-
ferent methodologies are likely to be appropriate. The majority of
this paper is dedicated to a discussion of assessment methodologies
that have been used in engineering education. We conclude with a
discussion of the importance of establishing collaborations be-
tween researchers in engineering education and educational
research.