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The Engineering Education departments at three large public universities are collaborating on an NSF-funded program to document the impact of the emerging EER&I community. This paper is a report on what has been learned to date. Goals of the program include (1) identifying the broader EER&I network, (2) identifying examples of EER&I impact, (3) organizing and hosting a summit of EER&I leaders to develop a systematic process for documenting the impact of EER&I, (4) piloting the process, and (5) compiling and disseminating best practices. Members of the community have been identified, including many who are conducting engineering education research without being part of a formal engineering education program, and some examples of the impact of engineering education research have been gathered. The summit has been held, and a process for documenting the impact of EER&I has been proposed. Results of the summit include a range of possible metrics that can be used to document EER&I impact and ways to communicate that impact. Some pilots have been conducted at the three collaborating schools and several other sites, and a few institutions are now preparing documentation. Results of the summit and the pilots will be shared. In their pilots, engineering education programs have been able to collect and analyze data that describe their efforts to impact how engineering is taught at the university level. Quantitative metrics include research expenditures, publications, number of graduates, positions graduates hold, faculty leadership in groups that influence engineering education policy, and so on. It has proven to be more difficult to demonstrate a direct causal relationship between those efforts and actual changes in the way engineering is taught in the traditional disciplines. The path to each change seems to be unique, and the most effective way to convey the impact is through telling each individual story. Thus, ongoing work focuses on generating a range of qualitative approaches that can be used to document and analyze these change processes. Collaborators on the NSF program are currently piloting ways to convey those stories to the many audiences interested in the results. 

In this paper or poster presentation, we hope to present to and interact with our audience with respect to a key touchpoint in our national study of engineering education reform. Based on an NSF collaborative grant, our project team has conducted approximately 280 semi-structured interviews at over 40 different institutions with regards to change processes that operate within engineering education. Originally inspired by our earlier work on ABET, we framed our study around questions of governance, namely how national organizations and national conversations do and don’t shape changes in engineering education. However, our early interviews made it very clear that US engineering schools viewed themselves as participating in a competitive market, where local initiatives and innovations are as important if not more important to their student experience and institutional reputation. This said, market mechanisms and the way in which local innovations circulate (entrepreneurship, maker spaces, humanitarian engineering) are themselves a form of coordination, pointing to more subtle modes of governance that operate within engineering education. Drawing on the multi-theory framework of Austin and Jones’ for understanding Higher Education Governance (2015), we use this presentation to begin to tease apart the different modes through which change occurs within engineering education. 

This paper reflects on the significance of ABET’s “maverick evaluators” and what it says about the limits of accreditation as a mode of governance in US engineering education. The US system of engineering education operates as a highly complex system, where the diversity of the system is an asset to robust knowledge production and the production of a varied workforce. ABET Inc., the principal accreditation agency for engineering degree programs in the US, attempts to uphold a set of professional standards for engineering education using a voluntary, peer-based system of evaluation. Key to their approach is a volunteer army of trained program evaluators (PEVs) assigned by the engineering professional societies, who serve as the frontline workers responsible for auditing the content, learning outcomes, and continuous improvement processes utilized by every engineering degree program accredited by ABET. We take a look specifically at those who become labeled “maverick evaluators” in order to better understand how this system functions, and to understand its limitations as a form of governance in maintaining educational quality and appropriate professional standards within engineering education. ABET was established in 1932 as the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development (ECPD). The Cold War consensus around the engineering sciences led to a more quantitative system of accreditation first implemented in 1956. However, the decline of the Cold War and rising concerns about national competitiveness prompted ABET to shift to a more neoliberal model of accountability built around outcomes assessment and modeled after total quality management / continuous process improvement (TQM/CPI) processes that nominally gave PEVs greater discretion in evaluating engineering degree programs. However, conflicts over how the PEVs exercised judgment points to conservative aspects in the structure of the ABET organization, and within the engineering profession at large. This paper and the phenomena we describe here is one part of a broader, interview-based study of higher education governance and engineering educational reform within the United States. We have conducted over 300 interviews at more than 40 different academic institutions and professional organizations, where ABET and institutional responses to the reforms associated with “EC 2000,” which brought outcomes assessment to engineering education, are extensively discussed. The phenomenon of so-called “maverick evaluators” reveal the divergent professional interests that remain embedded within ABET and the engineering profession at large. Those associated with Civil and Environmental Engineering, and to a lesser extent Mechanical Engineering continue to push for higher standards of accreditation grounded in a stronger vision for their professions. While the phenomenon is complex and more subtle than we can summarize in an abstract, “maverick evaluators” emerged as a label for PEVs who interpreted their role, including determinations about whether certain content “appropriate to the field of study,” utilizing professional standards that lay outside of the consensus position held by the majority of the member of the Engineering Accreditation Commission. This, conjoined with the engineers’ epistemic aversion to uncertainty and concerns about the legal liability of their decisions, resulted in a more narrow interpretation of key accreditation criteria. The organization then designed and used a “due-process” reviews process to discipline identified shortcomings in order to limit divergent interpretations. The net result is that the bureaucratic process ABET built to obtain uniformity in accreditation outcomes, simultaneously blunts the organization’s capacity to support varied interpretations of professional standards at the program level. The apparatus has also contributed to ABET’s reputation as an organization focused on minimum standards, as opposed to one that functions as an effective driver for further change in engineering education.