This engineering education research project to develop and implement a sustainable, scalable and transferable system to measure and analyze selected characteristics of students, instructors, courses and curricula in order to increase success in attaining student learning outcomes and engineering program objectives. The main goal of the proposal is to develop, test and implement an IT-supported knowledge management system which allows users to obtain high quality, high resolution, statistically significant information with proper controls in order to decide which factors are the most critical and how and when they can be most impacted by intervention. Three types of studies are planned: 1) Correlational Studies investigating the impact of student, instructor and course/curricular attributes and characteristics on student learning outcomes and program objectives; 2) Chronobiological Studies examining the effects of sleep and scheduling on student performance and 3) An Experimental Instructional Laboratory demonstrating how educational interventions may be accurately assessed. The study is using performance criteria derived from student learning outcomes as defined by ABET as dependent variables and can be transferable across the board for engineering programs. It incorporates feedback from cooperative education employers and alumni to ensure the real-world relevance of measurements and potential educational innovations. It creates a sustainable system of measurements using information technology as part of an assessment and feedback and an educational testing paradigm which can be applied to any new innovation to measure the success against short-term and long-term objectives. The project design not only allows for direct measures of sleep/activity cycles? effects on learning and performance, it allows for these effects to be potentially correlated with other psychological variables, such as learning styles, multiple intelligences, and perspectives. This will provide unique new data on student learning processes at the level of higher education.
