Outcomes and Student Proficiency Levels

The CDIO Syllabus is a detailed list of knowledge and skills in which a graduating engineer should have developed some level of proficiency. It comprehensively addresses the first part of the central question posed at the start of this chapter  

What is the full set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that engineering students should possess as they leave the university, and at what level of proficiency  

However, Standard Two on learning outcomes calls for more than a mere listing of topics. It requires that a program set specific, detailed learning outcomes for personal and interpersonal skills, and product, process, and system building skills 

Review the CDIO Syllabus v2.0 and make modifications or additions to customize it for a specific program within its university and national context. 

Identify the important stakeholders of the program, both internal and external to the university, including faculty, graduates, representatives of industry, and others. 

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In the next chapter, we address the question of what engineering students should learn, that is, the full set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that engineering students should possess as they leave the university, and at what level of proficiency. The main resource for setting such learning outcomes is the CDIO Syllabus. 

Translate the expected levels of proficiency into more formally stated educational objectives and learning outcomes that are the basis for instructional design and student learning assessment. 

Whatever alternative is used, stakeholders must be posed a question that does not allow them to respond that all items are equally important. Several qnestions can be asked, including What level of proficiency should the students achieve as they graduate An alternative question is What is the relative importance of these topics , assuming that students should be more proficient at more important tasks. A third way to ask is Relatively how much time should be spent on this topic Experience shows that all of these will give about the same result. The first is more directly transferable to learning outcomes, and is, therefore, the recommended question. 

Most physical chemistry laboratory experiments are concerned with measurements. There is a basic difference, however, between experiments performed at the undergraduate level and those performed in physical chemistry research laboratories. At the undergraduate level, students perform experiments that have a known outcome. Generally, these experiments have been performed many times over a number of years by numerous students. In research laboratories, on the other hand, scientists usually perform experiments on unknowns. There are no laboratory instructors from whom a research scientist can obtain the correct answer to an experimental measurement to see if he or she has performed the measurement correctly. Thus, it is important for students of physical chemistry, who hope someday to become proficient researchers, to learn how to determine the reliability of their experimental data. One common way to help determine the reliability of experimental data is to perform the experiment more than once. It is known that when a measurement is made more than once, the results scatter around some average value. We shall see in the next few sections that this experimental scatter can be used to help determine the probability that the average value is the true value. Before going into this, however, let us first review simple probability theory. 

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