Work in progress: Quantifying learning by reflecting on doing in an engineering design, build and test course

How can instructors leverage assessment instruments in design, build, and test courses to simultaneously improve student outcomes and assess student learning well enough to improve courses for future students? A learning statement is a structured [Experience|Learning|Value] text-based construct for students in AME4163 Principles of Engineering Design to record what they learned by reflecting on authentic immersive experiences throughout the semester. The immersive experiences include lectures, assignments, reviews, building, testing and a post-analysis for design of an electromechanical system to address a given customer need. Over the past three years. in the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, we have collected almost 30,000 learning statements from almost 400 students that we propose to use to improve our understanding of what students have learned by reflecting on doing and thence how we might improve the delivery of the course. In this paper, we briefly introduce the framework of a computer program used to process a large number of learning statements by way of providing context. We focus on comparing what students learned with what instructors expected the students to learn thus providing evidence-based guidance to instructors on how to improve the delivery of AME4163 thus providing an initial answer to the question posed above.