COVID-19: How Do Engineering Students Assess its Impact on Their Learning?

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic forced a rapid transition from face-to-face learning to an online format at virtually all universities worldwide. The Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering (CCEE) at San Diego State University (SDSU) had to make such a transition in mid-March 2020 within a ten-day period. The Civil Engineering program needs to comply with strict ABET accreditation rules. One of them is an indirect assessment made by students in each course: they judge to which degree ABET-mandated Student Outcomes (SO) were actually met in any course designated to deliver them. The unprecedented pandemic situation created an opportunity to administer a student survey twice to detect any differences between the SO coverage before the COVID lockdown in the middle of the Spring 2020 semester and the parallel coverage of the same SOs during the pandemic period throughout the rest of the semester. With all other conditions remaining unchanged, this creates an opportunity to examine the actual impacts of COVID in a relatively unbiased way. The purpose of this research is to find out whether COVID-19 created any significant changes in students’ assessment of their learning as mandated by ABET. The research method applied is statistical analysis of student scores submitted by a self-administrated online survey. The two-sided t-test was used to assess the statistical significance of the differences observed. This paper does not address any issue related to the students’ or instructors’ perceptions of problems created for them by the COVID pandemic: they were real and challenging for both parties. Instead, it focuses exclusively on numbers resulting from students’ surveys. The scores for SO coverage during the pandemic remained quite high although generally somewhat lower than their equivalents before the pandemic. However, 81% of student scores comparisons performed for sixteen SOs and separately along individual courses covering designated SOs did not yield differences that are statistically significant at the 5% level. This would indicate that generally, COVID-19 did not alter students’ positive perception about the SO coverage in their courses. Courses and SOs that were significantly negatively affected by the COVID restrictions were the ones that had to rely on lab experimentations and student teamwork.