Cross-National Evaluation of Learning Assessment in First-Year Engineering Students: US Experience Applied at Two Universities in Chile

The need to demonstrate the quality of engineering student learning outcomes has intensified in recent years as the assessment movement has spread into engineering education, been widely adopted by accreditation agencies, and has been incorporated into international accreditation and curricular agreements. Developing quality standards and measuring learning levels can be difficult enough from campus to campus within a particular country. However, exporting and adapting such standards across countries and educational traditions and cultures is even more challenging. The present paper describes the portability of one system of assessment developed at a U.S. institution as applied to two engineering faculties in Chile. The process followed during the initial training and development provides some good insights into how assessment and quality improvement processes can be quickly implemented. However, the implementation required cultural shifts in how the program approached, and administrators and faculty thought about, assessment for quality improvement. The experience in Chile provides some lessons on the opportunities and potential pitfalls of carrying out such a process in other countries and programs.