Assessing the importance and cognition level of acce’s student learning outcomes: Industry, educator, and student perceptions

In 2014, the American Council for Construction Education (ACCE), the leading accreditation body for construction degree programs, formally approved new student learning outcome (SLO) based standards. As degree programs across the country begin to adopt these guidelines, it is important to assess the ability of these SLOs to address the needed knowledge base for new college graduates. This study is an attempt to gauge perceptions of ACCE’s Bachelor Degree SLOs and identify similarities and/or differences in both topic importance and cognition level recommendations between industry practitioners, faculty, and students. The data indicate that while there is strong alignment within each stakeholder group, there are few areas of agreement on topic importance between groups outside of the top and bottom ranking items. These include the highest importance being assigned to analyzing construction documents for planning and management of construction processes; and, the lowest importance generally being sustainable principles and surveying. The data also indicate that there is generally strong agreement between all stakeholders on the cognition levels for most SLOs. Lastly, the data reveal that there is no correlation between an SLO’s perceived importance and its expected cognition level–an indicator that there is no association between knowledge breadth and depth.