CAREER: Characterizing the Process of Global Formation for Engineers

This CAREER project will explore how engineering students develop the skills necessary to function in a globalized engineering work environment. Addressing the complex and global issues that our world faces often requires the collaboration of teams of engineers from across cultural and national boundaries. Working in international and intercultural teams can enhance innovation, but only when engineers have the skills necessary to support such collaboration.

This project will study the processes by which students develop the skills needed for success in a global engineering workplace. The project will characterize how this learning takes place in many contexts including programs where engineering students travel abroad (e.g., study abroad, internship abroad) and experiences that do not involve travel (e.g., global courses, domestic internships).

Understanding this learning process will support the development of curricular and co-curricular experiences that help all engineering students develop these essential skills, regardless of whether they are able to travel abroad. The project will also produce two online educational modules that can be used to enhance learning in experiential programs and provide workshop and webinar training to educators in how to implement these modules.

The research and educational activities in this project support National Science Foundation’s mission to advance national health, prosperity, and welfare by supporting the professional formation of engineers through the development of an understanding as to how students become global engineers and providing tools to facilitate this process.

This project will characterize the process of global engineering competency (GEC) development by studying travel and non-travel global programs for engineers. The project will address the following research questions: RQ1) What significant events can initiate the process of global formation for engineering students? RQ2) How do engineering students interpret and respond to significant events in their intercultural experiences?

RQ3) How do personal, program, contact, and context factors inform engineering students’ processes of global formation during intercultural experiences? The project will use a longitudinal video reflection method to collect weekly video reflections from 50 engineering students participating in four categories of experiences: study abroad, global courses at home, internship abroad, and internship at home.

These reflections will be analyzed using critical incident analysis (RQ1), a hybrid coding approach (RQ2), and framework analysis (RQ3) to develop a framework describing the process of GEC development. The framework analysis will be grounded in existing theoretical frameworks of GEC and intercultural competence development. The educational activities for the project will focus on the development of two online training modules: 1) Reflecting on Experiential Learning and 2) Connecting Culture and Engineering.

All participants in the research study will complete both training modules before participating in their intercultural experiences, and the video reflection data from the research study will be used to evaluate and refine the modules. Two workshops and a webinar will be presented to various faculty audiences to disseminate these modules, which will also be published online as a publicly accessible resource.

The key contributions of this project are expected to include: (1) developing a framework describing the process of GEC development; (2) expanding our understanding of the relationship between GEC and intercultural competence; (3) refining the video reflection data collection technique; (4) disseminating two online educational modules; (5) training an estimated 150 educators to use the modules through workshops/webinars; (6) training 50 students in critical reflection using the educational modules. Strengthening global and experiential learning for engineers connects to ABET criteria and NAE goals focused on educating engineers who can work on teams to address the global challenges facing the world today.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.