Evaluating Interventions That Develop Transferable Competencies and Skills

This chapter presents practical guidelines for educators to evaluate educational interventions designed to develop engineering students’ transferable competencies and skills. The guidelines can be used when implementing new initiatives at the module or programme level, as well as documenting impact for your promotion dossier. Evaluation should be seen as an integral part of improving teaching and learning because documenting effective educational practices enables them to be appreciated and shared, and to identify points for improvement that fall short of your desired teaching goals. We provide a semi-sequential eight-step guide for articulating evaluation goals, identifying the intervention and skills to be evaluated, selecting methodologies and evaluation tools, and finally acting on the results of the evaluation. Additionally, this chapter offers criteria for assessing the quality of the evaluation itself to ensure the validity, reliability, and credibility of findings. Overall, the chapter will introduce you to tools to design evaluations to inform pedagogical decision making and strengthen the impact of interventions that develop transferable competencies and skills.