Background: Accreditation organizations broadened program assessment criteria in ways that present challenges for the evaluation of learning outcomes. This is especially the case in courses where there are not narrowly defined questions or definitive solutions, such as engineering ethics. While protocols for learning assessment exist, there is…

Background: Cognitive style has been shown to influence the number, type, and organization of an individual's ideas. Concept maps are used regularly to assess students' organization and mastery of knowledge (their cognitive level) in engineering courses, yet very few studies have analyzed concept maps with respect to cognitive style.…