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assessment The development of meaningful and useful assessment tools has been a major priority of the CONNECT program. We have used assessment to identify problems and needs, initiate solutions and answers, and ultimately track their effectiveness. Assessing a program such as CONNECT has some interesting challenges. For example, courses typically have grades, assignments, quizzes and exams as tools on which to anchor an assessment process. In CONNECT we purposefully steer away from grades, credit and testing of any kind. Also, a particular participant might leave a workshop with learning experiences and enhanced skills that are very different from those gained by the participant in the next seat. Our assessment is based on input from all the constituencies involved with the engineering school. Feedback from students, faculty, facilitators, recruiters and alumni is the mainstay of the assessment process. We have followed a rule that assessment tools should be very brief and provide quantitative and qualitative information. With the assistance of Assessment Alternatives, Inc., we developed methods to analyze both types of data in order to answer our assessment objectives. assessment overviewOur assessment vehicles have been sensitive to our approach, and our multiple measures and indicators have drawn a clear relationship between workshop participation, enhanced awareness of communication issues, and improved communication behaviors. There has also been a strong relationship between pedagogical changes made in the workshops, increased student acceptance of the program, and improved third party ratings of communication behaviors. These positive results have been consistent with anecdotal observations. The evaluation process includes a participant pre-survey for each incoming freshman class. This survey has created an extensive database on entering students' previous training and experience in communication, on their comfort level as communicators, and on their perceptions of what constitutes effective communication. The CONNECT workshops themselves are rated by the participants on workshop specific criteria using a 5-point scale. Participants have consistently rated the workshops at an approximately "4" or higher average. Ratings are tracked from year-to-year and have identified weaknesses in the workshops and been sensitive to changes initiated as a result. Additional assessment methods have included third party evaluation of students' awareness and understanding of the behavioral aspects of communication. The results show that students appear to be more attuned to vocal, physical and social behaviors and have acquired a clearer and more specific sense of the skills they need to work on in the future. External evaluators have also reviewed video recordings of student presentations and their ratings indicated improvement since the implementation of the CONNECT program. Similarly, CONNECT participants have been highly rated for their articulateness, maturity and their non-verbal communication skills by participating job recruiters. Also, feedback from students, faculty, alumni and external sources has been key to assessing the effectiveness of CONNECT. Faculty response has been enthusiastic, and the number of faculty "subscribing" to the program continues to increase. Student reaction has also been positive. For example during annual meetings of our Engineering Advisory Council, student members have promoted the CONNECT workshop model as a way of addressing numerous other technical and non-technical aspects of the curriculum. An important external review was provided by an ABET accreditation visit (November 2000). The accreditation report stated that "the school of engineering is commended for its cross-disciplinary initiatives to enhance engineering education, including CONNECT, ..........". One reviewer reported, "Special note should be made of the exceptional CONNECT program." The program was adjudged to be an effective and innovative way to enable students "to develop an excellent communication skill set."
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