Experiential Learning and its Assessment in the MIT Gordon Engineering Leadership Program This paper reports on the MIT Gordon Engineering Leadership (GEL) Program, including an overview of the program, and its continuing assessment to measure student gains in their leadership capabilities. The report begins with a description of the taught and practice components of the GEL program with particular attention to role of mastery experience, and includes the Syllabus-based method of measuring student team and leadership capabilities. In addition to the results specific to the Gordon program, the conclusion also provides a general lesson about the importance of mastery experiences in engineering education, and how the CDIO Syllabus can be used by to create Syllabus-based measures to assess leadership and other engineering education programs. Founded in 2008, the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program was formed to provide selected students with a foundation of leadership capabilities that would strengthen their contributions to engineering teams, and then advance over time into leadership roles. Over time, the program has grown to include roughly 100 third and fourth year engineering students who first participate in a one year program, consisting of two semester lecture courses and a two-hour leadership laboratory once a week for 24 weeks during the academic year. Then roughly 30 of these students are accepted into a second year, when they take two additional lecture courses and are asked to play leadership roles in the Gordon laboratories and other activities. While the over-all program will be described, the focus of the study is on the first year of the program. The focus of this presentation is on the course objectives, and how they are served in the laboratories. This summary includes overview of leadership course objectives, and how each lab has a specific focus on such areas as inter-personal communication, negotiation and compromise. The lab process will be described, describing how students are divided into teams of five or six, with a different member on each team being assigned to lead the activity and practice a leadership capability. At the end of each lab, the team leaders in that session are expected to review their own performance, the members of the team also comment on the leader performance, and then all participants have an opportunity to review the activity. Finally each of the leaders for that day are taken aside by a member of the program staff who provide them a summary review on an observation form, and then that student is asked to sign the form that they take way to be put into a folder they maintain for the program. The assessment method will then be described, showing how student self-efficacy measures can be based on 4th level CDIO Syllabus capabilities, and the results of surveys using those measures at the start and the end of the one year program will be used to provide a measure of student gains in their confidence in their leadership capabilities.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014