Assessing Life Long Learning Utilizing Coop Work Term Report

Abstract

CEAB introduced graduate attributes (GA) as a tool to measure the performance of an engineering institute in delivering its engineering programs. The 12th attribute is Life Long Learning (LL), which is defined as the student’s ability to identify and address their own educational needs. A student’s reaching out to technical references, away from an academic setting, is identified as a measuring tool for LL. As a pilot study, the technical references evaluated were extracted from a sample of 12 artifacts - 4th year work-term technical reports submitted as a component of co-operative education (co-op).
To measure LL, a categorical metric to assess quality of cited sources was used to assess student competence in selecting credible technical information. All students included at least one technical reference in the design/analysis section (Technical Reference, TR); with most students using a mix of TR quality. Only 1/3 of students had average TR quality scores that met or exceeded the benchmark of 3.0. There may be a relationship between the type of work sector experienced and quality of references used.
The pilot study suggests that using a quality metric for technical references within student documents has potential to assess lifelong learning at both the individual and cohort level. Results reinforce the need to educate and reiterate to engineering students the importance of credibility of the source of information over convenience.