Q. What are OUTCOMES?
A. See below
OUTCOMES This category provides three pieces of information:
- type of outcome
- nature of the intervention's impact on student performance
- verbatim statement of the main result(s)
Type of outcome. The types of outcomes reflect ABET's engineering accreditation criteria 3a-k program outcomes and also outcomes as reported in the literature:
- attitude
- academic achievement
- communicatoin skills
- creative thinking
- engagement
- higher order thinking skills
- laboratory skills/research skills
- problem solving skills
- professional skills
- retention
- teams
- utility of the assessment instrument
Five of the subcategories attitude, communication skills, retention, teams, and utility of the assessment) are further divided into sub-subcategories. These sub-subcategories were created to best capture the nature of the outcome.
Nature of the intervention's impact on student performance. Each outcome is coded for one of four possible types of impact on student performance. The coding is based on statements made in the articles, not the coder's interpretation of them. The types of impact are:
- Performance enhanced Articles were coded as "performance enhanced" if they provided evidence or simply claimed that the intervention led to an increase or improvement in student performance.
- Performance not enhanced Articles were coded as "performance not enhanced" if they provided evidence or simply claimed that the intervention did not lead to enhanced performance, that is, there was no improvement. This category includes experimental and comparison group studies that found no differences between groups and pre/post studies that found no change over time. Although these studies provide no evidence that the intervention enhances performance, they also indicate that students who received the intervention do no worse than students who did not receive the intervention.
- Performance declined Articles were coded as "performance declined" if they provided evidence or simply claimed that the intervention led to a decline or decrease in student performance.
- Inconclusive Articles were coded as "inconclusive" if they provided evidence that both supported and did not support the outcome, if the statistical results were not sufficient in the authors' view to make a claim of significance, or if they claimed the outcome was inconclusive.
For the outcome, Utility of the Assessment Instrument, "enhanced" means that the assessment instrument is useful and "not enhanced" means the assessment instrument is not useful. The words USEFUL or NOT USEFUL are typed in along with the verbatim statement of the outcome for this category.
Verbatim statement of the main result(s). Each outcome is presented with a verbatim statement of the most salient or overarching result, though text is sometimes deleted and replaced it with ellipses (...) for concision and sometimes text is added in brackets (usually the name of treatment or control group) to clarity. Otherwise, the text was copies it as printed, including errors of grammar and punctuation.
Many articles provided multiple statements of the most salient outcome in multiple places (abstract, results, discussion, and/or conclusion). The most succinct statement was selected for inclusion in the database. Verbatim statements of tangential or more targeted or detailed analyses have typically not been included in the database, as the purpose of the database is to provide an overview of the relevant research, not an exhaustive compilation of results. For example, if an intervention targeted all students in a course and the author(s) provided the results for the class as a whole and for males and females separately, in most cases, even though the article was coded for "Gender" and "Male" and "Female," only the verbatim statement of the results for the class as a whole are presented. Database users are encouraged to read the original article for more specific results.