Assessment of Educational Proficiency

Proposal to Establish the Assessing Educational Proficiency Constituent Committee

Proposal to Establish the Engineering & Computing Teaching Credentials Constituent Committee

Proposal to Establish the Engineering Educators Certification Constituent Committee

Proposal to Establish the Educational Proficiency Constituent Committee

Proposal to Establish the Credentialing Educational Proficiency Constituent Committee

Like other complex distributed systems such as power and transportation, a nation’s educational system is vital to its long term security and prosperity. For over a decade engineering & computing education have been recognized as legitimate fields of scholarship. During that period a substantial body of organized knowledge has emerged about teaching and learning in engineering & computing education, their application, and the factors that contribute to the design of effective curriculum. The existence of this body of knowledge places an obligation on current and future engineering & computing educators to connect their practice to that body of knowledge just as a practicing engineer is obligated to maintain professional competence.

Many engineering educators report great benefits from attendance at workshops and courses of training focused on pedagogy in engineering & computing. More generally, in response to numerous complaints about poor teaching, many countries now require their university teachers to be trained and certificated to ensure better quality and more effective teaching. The final report of the 2017 ASEE Inter Divisional Town hall Meeting calls for “ASEE to develop a framework for a voluntary certification program for engineering educators”. Since ASEE is the oldest society devoted to engineering education and has world-wide recognition and status it seems it should take on a leadership role in assessing, advancing, and certifying the proficiency of engineering educators.

The undersigned propose forming an ASEE Constituent Committee which will explore the needs, methods and potential of developing voluntary certification of engineering & computing educators. The goals of the Constituent Committee are to:

    1. Creating a self-sustaining forum for individuals interested in understanding and enhancing instructional and curriculum quality in engineering, computing, and engineering technology.
    2. Reviewing international certification of engineering, computing and technology education.
    3. Developing criteria for the recognition or partial recognition of assessed courses in educational proficiency and scholarship.
    4. Developing and evaluate models of education for educational proficiency and scholarship.
    5. Reviewing, maintaining and synthesizing the ever growing body of educational research and its bearing on teaching and to make it available to the profession.
    6. Considering the possibility of recognizing different levels of proficiency and scholarship.