Core concepts and learning outcomes in an introductory transportation engineering course: An evaluation of pilot implementations

Over the last two and a half years, about 20 transportation engineering educators from 13 different colleges and universities across the United States have been working collaboratively on an initiative to develop and implement a set of core concepts and learning outcomes for a typical introductory transportation engineering course. This group has developed knowledge tables for the core concepts associated with traffic operations, transportation planning, geometric design, transportation finance, transportation economics, traffic safety, transit, non-motorized transport, and human factors. This paper describes pilot implementations in the introductory transportation engineering courses at three different institutions. The institutions have class enrollments ranging from 15 to 75. Preliminary results from one of the institutions were presented at the 2011 ASEE Annual Conference; this paper adds the results from two additional institutions, assesses the efficacy of the approach individually as well as comparatively, and identifies areas of strength and weakness. Finally, the paper discusses how the results of the pilot implementations are informing the efforts of the group in enhancing the approach, and for future implementation efforts.