Conference Session

Trends in Engineering Education 1

Collection

2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Khairiyah Mohd-Yusof, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia; Fatin Aliah Phang, Faculty of Education, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia; Aziatul Niza Sadikin, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia; Syed Ahmad Helmi, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia; Mohd Johari Kamaruddin, Centre of Lipids Engineering & Applied Research (CLEAR), Faculty of Chemical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia.

Tagged Divisions

Educational Research and Methods

future career. In learning engineering knowledge, they also gainsome important soft skills such as communication skills, teamworking skills, problem solvingskills, leadership and so on6. However, in Malaysia, the internship experiences are onlyintroduced to engineering students after the second semester of their third year, right beforetheir senior year. The question is, how can first year engineering students also gain theengineering workplace knowledge, soft skills and motivation to be persistent in pursuingengineering study and eventually engineering career?There are many research on engineering students’ motivation and persistence in pursuingengineering study and career. Concannon & Barrow7 reported that engineering students’persistence

Conference Session

Student Learning, Problem Solving, & Critical Thinking 3

Collection

2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Eric L. Wang, University of Nevada, Reno; Ann-Marie Vollstedt, University of Nevada, Reno

Tagged Divisions

Educational Research and Methods

students (as measured by their individual grades). This assumption isbased on the fact that the group work in most classes requires that the students display a masteryof the skills learned from the assignments completed as an individual.While it is true that effective group work also requires many “soft skills” (e.g. teamwork andcommunication), a mastery of the “hard skills” is a necessary condition to be an effectiveteammate. Other studies found a relatively strong correlation between peer evaluations andindividual test scores5,14, which supports this notion.For obvious reasons it is difficult to create teams in a first-year, first-semester course withheterogeneous distributions of GPAs as is often recommended1,5,15. Thus, we expected to

Conference Session

Trends in Engineering Education 2

Collection

2014 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Eden Fisher, Carnegie Mellon University; Indira Nair, Carnegie Mellon University; Mustafa A. Biviji, E2RG

Tagged Divisions

Educational Research and Methods

aversion were presented as Personal Attributesthat can inhibit innovation.Concerning important Skills for innovation, students cited a speaker who emphasized,“You should be cataloguing and capturing expertise and ensuring we have adequateexpertise in those fields where we have to make decisions”. Soft skills were alsohighlighted, including management and leadership skills, developing strategy, the abilityto make decisions with imperfect data, communication skills, and developing anunderstanding of the holistic approach.The Process for Innovation was highlighted in different ways. One team suggested‘understanding the customer through the creation of a story’. This was related to different