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Application of Indirect and Direct Measures for Student Teamwork Outcome Assessment within an Undergraduate Civil Engineering Curriculum

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Conference

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Columbus, Ohio

Publication Date

June 24, 2017

Start Date

June 24, 2017

End Date

June 28, 2017

Conference Session

Balancing Act: Ideas in Pre- & Post- Surveys and Assessment of Professional Skills

Tagged Division

Civil Engineering

Page Count

14

DOI

10.18260/1-2--27597

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/27597

Download Count

871

Paper Authors

biography

William J. Davis P.E. The Citadel Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-3812-8654

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William J. Davis is a professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering at The Citadel in Charleston, SC. He received his Ph.D. in civil engineering from Georgia Tech and is a registered professional engineer. His research interests focus on infrastructure resiliency, transportation facility planning and design, highway safety, and active living by design. He teaches courses in capstone sengineeirgn design, engineering management, transportation engineering, geographic information systems, and land surveying.

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biography

Simon Thomas Ghanat P.E. The Citadel

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Dr. Simon Ghanat is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Citadel (Charleston, S.C.). He received his Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Arizona State University. His research interests are in Engineering Education and Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering. He previously taught at Bucknell University and Arizona State University.

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Kweku Tekyi Brown P.E. The Citadel Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-6497-8479

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Dimitra Michalaka P.E. The Citadel Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-7001-0579

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Dr. Dimitra Michalaka is an Assistant Professor at the department of civil and environmental engineering at The Citadel. Dr. Michalaka received her undergraduate diploma in civil engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), after which she entered into the transportation engineering graduate program at UF. She graduated with a Master’s of Science in May 2009 and with a Ph.D. in August 2012. Her research is primarily focused on traffic operations, congestion pricing, traffic simulation, and engineering education.

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Abstract

Teamwork is an essential professional proficiency that engineering students need to develop during their undergraduate educational program of study. An effective engineering undergraduate curriculum needs to provide ample opportunities to obtain functional teamwork skills, develop personal interaction proficiencies, and demonstrate essential levels cognitive development in preparation to successfully serve as contributing members of productive multidisciplinary teams, upon graduation. An ability for graduates to function on multidisciplinary teams is identified by ABET as one of eleven student outcomes in the a-k list that engineering programs need to adopt in preparing graduates to attain program educational objectives. Additionally, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Body of Knowledge (BOK) identifies nine professional outcomes, including teamwork, as a subset of 24 total outcomes that establish criteria for knowledge skills and attributes required by graduates to begin their careers in the practice of civil engineering. Criteria identified for teamwork require students to function effectively as a member of an intra-disciplinary team. This cognitive level of achievement satisfies the learning criteria threshold for Bloom’s Taxonomy 3, Application, as students would demonstrate an ability to apply learned concepts in familiar and unfamiliar situations.

This paper will describe teamwork activities occurring throughout the curriculum that map to assessment of the Department’s adopted teamwork outcome. An array of teamwork assignments and activities are provided throughout the civil engineering curriculum extending across all four years of the undergraduate coursework including: Introduction to Civil Engineering (CE 103) Surveying (CE 205), Geomatics (CE 208), Surveying Lab (CE 235/239), Highway Engineering (CE 302), Geotechnical Engineering Lab (CE 402), Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering (CE 409), Geotechnical Engineering II (CE 410), Environmental Engineering Lab (CE 419) and Capstone Design (CE 432/433). Teamwork assignments in these courses include: laboratory teams, problems solving sessions, homework assignments, class presentations, proposal preparation, design projects, and design project presentations. Course-based Embedded Indicator results, Department Senior Exit Survey data, assessment of student teamwork assignments, evaluation of student peer assessment, and student perception data of teamwork effectiveness will be evaluated and compared. Results from this paper will be useful in providing evidence on how well the curriculum is performing on this crucially profession skills outcomes and how well learning objectives are scaffold across the curriculum for optimal sequential learning of teamwork concepts and characteristics. Findings are indented to be of interest to other institutions that are working to adopt and refine effective educational methods and assessment criteria for support of teamwork outcomes.

Davis, W. J., & Ghanat, S. T., & Brown, K. T., & Michalaka, D. (2017, June), Application of Indirect and Direct Measures for Student Teamwork Outcome Assessment within an Undergraduate Civil Engineering Curriculum Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--27597

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