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National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Engineering Research Centers (ERC) are required to develop and implement education and outreach opportunities related to their core technical research topics to broaden participation in engineering and create partnerships between industry and academia. Additionally, ERCs must include an independent evaluation of their education and outreach programming to assess their performance and impacts. To date, each ERC's evaluation team designs its instruments/tools and protocols for evaluation, resulting in idiosyncratic and redundant efforts. Nonetheless, there is much overlap among the evaluation topics, concepts, and practices, suggesting that the ERC evaluation and assessment community might benefit from having a common set of instruments and protocols. ERCs' efforts could then be better spent developing more specific, sophisticated, and time-intensive evaluation tools to deepen and enrich the overall ERC evaluation efforts. The implementation of such a suite of instruments would further allow each ERC to compare its efforts to those across other ERCs as one data point for assessing its effectiveness and informing its improvement efforts. Members of a multi-ERC collaborative team, funded by the NSF, have been leading a project developing a suite of common instruments and protocols which contains both quantitative and qualitative tools. This paper reports on the development of a set of qualitative instruments that, to date, includes the following: (a) a set of interview/focus group protocols intended for various groups of ERC personnel, centered around five common topics/areas, and (b) rubrics for summer program participants' verbal poster/presentations and their written poster/slide deck presentation artifacts. The development process is described sequentially, beginning with a review of relevant literature and existing instruments, followed by the creation of an initial set of interview questions and rubric criteria. The initial versions of the tools were then pilot-tested with multiple ERCs. Feedback sessions with education/evaluation leaders of those piloting ERCs were then conducted, through which further revision efforts were made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Step-based tutoring consists in breaking down complicated problem-solving procedures into individual steps whose inputs can be immediately evaluated to promote effective student learning. Here, recent progress on the extension of a step-based tutoring for linear circuit analysis to cover new topics requiring complex, multi-step solution procedures is described. These topics include first and second-order transient problems solved using classical differential equation approaches. Students use an interactive circuit editor to modify the circuit appropriately for each step of the analysis, followed by writing and solving equations using methods of their choice as appropriate. Initial work on Laplace transform-based circuit analysis is also discussed. Detailed feedback is supplied at each step along with fully worked examples, supporting introductory multiple-choice tutorials and YouTube videos, and a full record of the student's work is created in a PDF document for later study and review. Further, results of a comprehensive independent evaluation involving both quantitative and qualitative analysis and users across four participating institutions are discussed. Overall, students had very favorable experiences using the step-based system across Fall 2020 and Spring 2021. At least 48% of students in the Fall 2020 semester and 60% of students in the Spring 2021 semester agreed or strongly agreed with all survey questions about positive features of the system. Those who had used the step-based system and the commercial MasteringEngineering system preferred the former by 69% to 12% margins in surveys. Instructors were further surveyed and 86% would recommend the system to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]