Concept inventories for control engineering: past and future

Abstract

There are many publications about innovations in control engineering education. However, in order to substantially advance control engineering education a deeper discourse about its teaching is needed. This discourse would greatly benefit from having a common instrument to measure the success of the innovations. This can be done by a concept inventory. In physics education, the Force Concept Inventory started such a process. This paper proposes properties of a suitable concept inventory in control engineering, compares them to existing concept inventories in control engineering and concludes that a new concept inventory has to be developed. A research design for the development of this concept inventory is proposed taking into account the control engineering-specific challenges