How the Capstone Class Students Perceive Their Knowledge Base?

The Capstone Course is a 5-credit Research and Development course covering all aspects of project development and implementation, entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity, team-work, and communication. The philosophy behind the course is to provide training and real-world, small-scale project experience for the students. This is where students work in teams and apply the culmination of their knowledge in the program. The paper presents how students in the capstone class perceive their knowledge base. This selfassessment is conducted in the first day of the class and the second one is conducted after the final examination. In addition, instructors ask knowledge-base questions, questions regarding the work experience, hours worked, credit hours taken currently, membership in professional organizations, expected date of graduation, and expectations from the course. Additional comments on strengths and weaknesses of the course represent the qualitative questions. The analysis of the information gathered at the beginning of the semester helps the management team to understand the composition of each team, their strengths and weaknesses, how much each team member can contribute to their team, whether the combination of hours worked and credit hours taken are in line with the UH guidelines, etc. During the first week of the semester, once the results are tallied, one-onone meetings were held with the students that were identified as having potential conflicts and who realized to have time constraints. Timely advice is given to these students so that they are successful to complete the course. Once the results of the selfknowledge at the end of the semester are tallied, they are compared to the results at the beginning of the semester, conclusions are drawn, and action items are identified that can help the curriculum remain current and in focus.