Resumen de Contextualizing professionalism in capstone projects using the IDEALS professional responsibility assessment
Jay McCormack, Steven Beyerlein, Denny Davis, Michael Trevisan, Jennifer Lebeau, Howard Davis, Susannah Howe, Patricia Brackin, Phillip Thompson, Robert Gerlick, M. Javed Khan, Paul Leiffer
Professionalism, which includes engineering ethics, is recognized as a valued topic in industry and education but it is difficult toteach and assess. This paper presents a web-based professional responsibility instrument and accompanying rubric, which is used toassess student understanding and skill in analyzing areas of strength and opportunity surrounding a professional responsibility issueassociated with the student’s design project. Students completing the assessment most frequently rated work competence as bothhighly important and an area of team strength while issues of sustainability were least frequently cited. The scored results of thisassessment revealed that students were moderately effective at relating issues of professional responsibility to situations within theirprojects as well as addressing them in a responsible manner. In a post-assessment survey, students and faculty rated the assessmentas somewhat accurate to mostly accurate. An inter-rater agreement study of the assessment showed that scorers were on averagewithin one level of difference on the scoring rubric 97% of the time. Results of administering the assessment in a capstone coursecan be easily packaged and presented as part of a program accreditation self-study.
