A Pathway to Create and Validate an Engineering Design Rubric across All Engineering Programs

Although in many engineering schools, cornerstone and capstone projects are significant design opportunities for engineering students in the first year and senior year, respectively, however, there is a need to scaffold student's design knowledge throughout an entire four-year curriculum. In engineering education, there is a need to design a comprehensive rubric that can be used consistently throughout the curriculum for assessing and scaffolding students' design knowledge. In this work-in-progress paper, the goal is to propose a comprehensive rubric for assessing design knowledge that uses the newest ABET definition of design, proposes a common design language and general assessment criteria for engineering instructors, evaluates design knowledge at individual levels, covers different design steps, and assists students in developing their design skills throughout the curriculum. For this purpose, we are using engineering education literature and the ABET design definition to propose a rubric that measure student's design knowledge longitudinally and tie them to the levels of Bloom's taxonomy.