International experiences are viewed as important components of undergraduate engineering education. Yet little has been done to define global preparedness, specify alternatives for achieving it, or determine to what degree being globally prepared is the result of personal attributes, prior experiences (including pre-college), or specific educational experiences. A collaboration of investigators from four universities (Pittsburgh, Southern California, Lehigh, and Clemson) are investigating how the broad spectrum of international experiences both in and outside of formal curricula impact engineering students’ global preparedness. Now in its fifth year, we have conducted three primary studies. The first was an extensive Delphi survey with subject matter experts. The second consisted of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of students at our four institutions. The third is a much larger survey of engineering students at 15 representative universities across the U.S.
This paper focuses on the results of this third study. At each campus we obtained stratified random samples of freshmen and seniors; in the case of seniors we subdivided the sample into two cohorts – those that had an international experience while an undergraduate student and those that had not participated in an international activity. All students completed a carefully tested instrument that captured their demographics, experiences and a measure of their global preparedness. To determine the latter, we utilized the nationally normed Global Perspective Inventory developed by Braskamp and colleagues. This has enabled us to identify changes in global awareness, knowledge and thinking over the course of the students’ transition from incoming freshman to graduating senior. We report what we have learned from this extensive sample of over 2,500 students. The results of this third study and the two earlier linked studies have resulted in guidelines for engineering administrators and faculty interested in preparing students for the global economy. Similar to our earlier papers, we provide an overview of the updated results of this NSF funded research initiative that has investigated how the various internationally focused learning experiences within engineering (both curricular and co-curricular) impact students’ global preparedness.
http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-6884-7070
University of Pittsburgh
[biography]
Larry J. Shuman is Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Distinguished Service Professor of industrial engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on improving the engineering education experience with an emphasis on assessment of design and problem solving, and the study of the ethical behavior of engineers and engineering managers. A former Senior Editor of the Journal of Engineering Education, Shuman is the Founding Editor of Advances in Engineering Education. He has published widely in engineering education literature, and is co-author of Engineering Ethics: Balancing Cost, Schedule and Risk - Lessons Learned from the Space Shuttle (Cambridge University Press). He received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in Operations Research and a B.S.E.E. from the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Shuman is an ASEE Fellow.
Dr. Mary Besterfield-Sacre is the Nickolas A. DeCecco Professor in Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the Director for the Engineering Education Research Center (EERC) in the Swanson School of Engineering, and serves as a Center Associate for the Learning Research and Development Center. Her principal research is in engineering education assessment, which has been funded by the NSF, Department of Ed, Sloan, EIF, and VentureWell. Dr. Sacre’s current research focuses on three distinct but highly correlated areas – innovative design and entrepreneurship, engineering modeling, and global competency in engineering. She is currently associate editor for the AEE Journal.
Scott Streiner is a Ph.D. candidate in the Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include engineering global competency, curricula and assessment; evidence-based teaching practices and curricular innovations applied to misconceptions; and engineering education policy. His research explores the nature of global competency development by assessing how international experiences improve the global perspectives of engineering students. His dissertation investigates how best to design and operationalize effective global programming strategies within engineering curricula.
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3056-5494
University of Southern California
[biography]
Gisele Ragusa is a Professor of Engineering Education at the University of Southern California. She conducts research on college transitions and retention of underrepresented students in engineering, PreK-12 STEM Education, ethics, socially assistive robotics, and also research about engineering global preparedness.
Lisa Benson is a Professor of Engineering and Science Education at Clemson University, and the past editor of the Journal of Engineering Education. Her research focuses on the interactions between student motivation and their learning experiences. Her projects include studies of student perceptions, beliefs and attitudes towards becoming engineers and scientists, and their development of problem-solving skills, self-regulated learning practices, and epistemic beliefs. Other projects in the Benson group involve students’ navigational capital, and researchers’ schema development through the peer review process. Dr. Benson is an American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Fellow, and a member of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), American Educational Research Association (AERA) and Tau Beta Pi. She earned a B.S. in Bioengineering (1978) from the University of Vermont, and M.S. (1986) and Ph.D. (2002) in Bioengineering from Clemson University.
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