Sample Project:
Institutional Research Project

As an affiliate of a university’s center for assessment and faculty development, Tom Clay & Associates, Inc. conducted a research project to explore issues that would impact the redesign of the Mechanical Engineering curriculum.  Our approach included interviewing students and conducting focus groups to gain deep insights, and administering email surveys to the department’s faculty members and graduating seniors to quantify those insights.  Among the topics explored were students’ own aspirations for learning during their four years at the university, their strategies for pursuing those aspirations, and how well they believed they realized them; students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of various pedagogical methods; and the impacts of the student experience on their attitudes toward their learning and themselves and the sources of those impacts.  The report contained not only the research results, but the identification of key challenges and an in-depth set of recommendations.

---