Evaluation

We know that I’m an Engineer gets students interested in engineering  and inspired to become engineers themselves.  However, one of the key objectives of the project is to smash engineering stereotypes; that the students learn that engineering is not just about car mechanism, spanners and hard hats. Measuring the students’ change in understanding of engineering has been difficult: closed questions tend not to work when assessing this, as they can be very leading. We decided to ask students to evaluate their own learning. Of course, this has its own limitations, but so far it is the best method we have found. We asked students for their degree of agreement on whether since taking part in I’m an Engineer, they know more about different aspects of being an engineer. Responses from 131 students told us that taking part in I’m an Engineer helps them to improve their understanding of what engineering is and what … Continue reading →

We know I’m an Engineer has a positive effect on students. Teachers tell us their classes “got fired up about engineering”, some students “chipped a nail typing to the engineers” and others admit they “didn’t even know that was a job, how cool!!” Anecdotes are fine, but as evaluation geeks we want numbers too. We asked students if they think engineers had an interesting job, and whether they’d like to work as engineers in the future, before and after taking part in I’m an Engineer. We gave them a choice of 5 options – from the very positive to the very negative, with a middle neutral one – to reply. 76 students filled in both the pre-event and post-event surveys. Students have a good perception of engineering, and I’m an Engineer improves it The majority of the students thought engineers had a “very” or “fairly interesting” job, and none of them thought it … Continue reading →

In March 2012 we ran I’m an Engineer for the first time. We’ve had engineers take part in the sister I’m a Scientist event so running a version specifically for engineers was an obvious move. Before the event started we had some unknowns, despite considering ourselves well versed in running online engagement events. Would engineers want to take part? Would we be able to recruit Maths and D&T teachers? What questions would students ask? When it came to evaluation time these were some of the key questions to answer. We’ve collected feedback from teachers, students and engineers. We’ve used their responses and data from the site to evaluate the event, and have written up our findings in the report below. I’m an Engineer evaluation report Here’s a summary of what we found: Did engineers want to take part? Yes. By the end of the first three months we had over … Continue reading →