Assessment of undergraduate engineering education outcomes

In an increasingly global world, it is important for engineers to be educated in global issues and have a deep understanding of the way their work as engineers impact society on the local, national, and global level. 
 
The goal of this project is to understand how the current BME curriculum is preparing students to be socially conscious engineers and generate recommendations for curriculum innovation in order to address any gaps. 
 
ABET, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, has set out seven different student outcomes for engineering programs to meet their standard. Of interest in this project is outcome two: An ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors.
 
Although this outcome is technically met by Carnegie Mellon's biomedical engineering program, it is not clear to what depth. This project is to analyze student reflections on ABET outcome two from the BME senior capstone course in order to answer the following research questions: 
  1. To what degree are students able to reflect on public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors in an engineering design context? 
  2. What sub-categories do students identify with each of the factors described in question one?