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Abstract The PROGRAM NAME is a high school engineering course aimed at broadening participation in engineering offered at over XXX schools across the country. This curriculum emphasizes the role of teams in engineering as well as enabling students to engage in authentic engineering design. In the 2021-2022 school year, our team began to develop and offer an end-of-course assessment to explore and communicate student learning in a summative manner. The assessment structure includes a portfolio and a scenario based exam. The portfolio is a team-produced document that describes the design process the team embark in over a period of time. A scenario- based exam is used to assess individual understanding of the engineering design. The scenario-based exam has been piloted several times and we present the initial findings as well as steps for future consideration of summative course assessment in high school engineering courses. This scenario included an authentic engineering problem related to urban design and planning in the suburbs of Nashville, TN. The exam included engineering artifacts designed by members of the team that worked on the actual project, as well as data related to the problem from relevant government agencies and media. Students were given the exam online, in their own classrooms. Teachers were given the opportunity to determine whether to administer the exam in a single long session or multiple shorter sessions. After administering the exam, teachers and students were able to provide feedback. We present the initial findings from the 2022-2023 academic school year. Additionally, we will describe the findings of the design team and feedback provided by teachers. Performance in earlier portions of the test was higher, aligning with teacher reports of students not finishing the exam. Students specifically scored high when asked to identify the problem within the scenario, describe how the engineering design process could be used to address the scenario, identify stakeholders and experts in the scenario, consider the value to society in solving the problem identified, and in choosing appropriate design solutions given a set of design requirements. The initial findings indicated that the exam needed to be shorter, and more aligned in scope to the type of design projects that students engage in during the curriculum. Next steps will be to create a new scenario and implement this with additional instructional scaffolds to tie into the classroom experience.
Chipps et al. (Sat,) studied this question.