The role of the questionnaires’ content in the students’ orientation for engineering education

Abstract

The learning environments and required capabilities of today’s graduate engineers are varying with the changing environment. Since it is important to coordinate the learning process with the external changes, engineering accreditation boards like ABET defines frameworks for engineering education worldwide. According to the revision of the evaluation criteria, it seems that the questionnaire’s contents are changing. The objective of this paper is to study how this will affect students/ instructors’ perception of learning process. In order to study the influence of adopting this new content on the evaluation results, two valid questionnaires (SEEQ and IDEA) were used according to their structure and development process and were distributed among six different Polymer Engineering classes of four instructors. At first total scores from two questionnaires were studied which showed different results, which could be due to the changes in students/instructor’s perception of learning process. Then the questionnaire that was based on student-centered environment which resulted in lower scores is discussed in details. It can be concluded that changing the questionnaire’s content according to new standards will change the students/instructors’ attitudes towards learning process.

Keywords

• educational assessment questionnaires learning student-center idea