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Critical Incident Assessment as a Tool to Reflect on Students' Emotional Responses During International Experiences

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Conference

2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual On line

Publication Date

June 22, 2020

Start Date

June 22, 2020

End Date

June 26, 2021

Conference Session

Study Abroad Experiences Intl Div Tech Session 9

Tagged Division

International

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

26

DOI

10.18260/1-2--34355

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/34355

Download Count

443

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Paper Authors

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Matthew Korey Purdue University

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Matthew Korey received his B.S. in Biomedical Engineering at Ohio State University (2011) where he studied the toxicity of various chemical compounds on hepatocytic cells. Matthew then joined the research groups of Dr. Jeffrey Youngblood and Dr. John Howarter at Purdue University in 2015 where he specialized in building a more robust understanding of sustainability in plastics through considering the full lifecycle of a product. For his work at Purdue, Matthew was awarded the NSF IGERT Fellowship (2016) and the NSF GRFP Fellowship (2017-2020). Matthew will receive his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering in May of 2020.

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Caitlyn M. Clarkson Purdue University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-9689-0842

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Caitlyn Clarkson is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University in Materials Engineering and will be graduating in May 2020. Her research is in polymer nanocomposite processing and characterization. She is a fellow in an NSF-funded integrative graduate education and research traineeship (IGERT) program.

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Kali D Frost Purdue University

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Joseph Andler Purdue University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-9416-1977

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Joseph (Joe) Andler is a Ph.D. candidate in materials engineering at Purdue University. Here, he is co-advised by Drs. Carol Handwerker in Materials Engineering and Rakesh Agrawal in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering. His research has a dual focus of 1. developing novel chalcogenide semiconductors for application in solution-processed photovoltaics and 2. completing environmental analyses including life cycle assessments and leaching procedures on these novel systems to identify areas of improvement in the context of environmental performance. Joe was a Ross fellow upon entering Purdue and later became an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) fellow supported by the National Science Foundation. He received his B.S. in physics from Marietta College in 2015.

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Congying Wang Purdue University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-7121-9961

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Congying Wang is a doctoral candidate in the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue University. Her research interests include the applications of environmental-friendly lead-free Sn coatings in electronics, the recycling of electronic wastes as part of the circular economy, and the design of interdisciplinary and intercultural curricula, particularly on global sustainability.

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Melissa S. Reeves Tuskegee University

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Melissa S. Reeves received her B.S. in chemistry at University of Florida and her Ph.D. in chemistry at Indiana University at Bloomington. She is an associate professor of chemistry at Tuskegee University where she specializes in physical chemistry and computational chemistry. Her research interests have ranged from calculating transition states of small molecule reactions in solution to molecular dynamics of polymers. She has worked on two American Chemical Society Physical Chemistry Exam Committees and is an active participant in the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning Physical Chemistry Laboratory (POGIL-PCL) community.

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Carol A. Handwerker Purdue University

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Carol Handwerker is the Reinhardt Schuhmann, Jr. Professor of Materials Engineering at Purdue University.

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Abstract

International experience was an essential component of the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT)-Sustainable Electronics (SE) Program between Purdue University and Tuskegee University as electronics manufacturing and recycling primarily occur abroad in India, many countries in Africa, and China. During this two-year IGERT-SE program, students visited Delhi and Rajasthan, India to meet with representatives throughout the supply chain including mining and extraction experts, electronics manufacturers, electronics assemblers, non-government organizations, recyclers, and waste handlers, and many other subject matter experts. The purpose of the trip was to obtain hands-on, in-person experience visually inspecting and participating in all levels of the electronics lifecycle. Additionally, the students were tasked with learning about sustainable practices from the local experts working in the field, and reflecting on areas for improvement. It is well known that traveling abroad immerses students, sometimes for the first time, in an unfamiliar culture and that their emotional response to experiences affects how they perceive the cultural and professional practices of the people and places they visit. To help students process their experiences, the IGERT-SE Program adopted the critical incident assessment (CIA) framework. The CIA was modified for the sustainability in electronics focus of the program in order to best help students understand how their emotional response affects their perception of practices pertaining to sustainability. While literature has shown the effectiveness of this assessment tool in many contexts (e.g. study abroad programs, social work, etc.) to the best of our knowledge no one has utilized this technique as a method for individuals to assess sustainability in an international culture and framework. The following study analyses the use of critical incident assessment (CIA) to improve understanding of the complex interactions between environmental, economic, and social/socio-political factors during focused educational trips to unfamiliar cultures and workplaces, and the interactions that took place within them as part of the international experience component of the NSF IGERT-SE Program. Results were collected from the students and faculty via a survey to identify factors and practices which were essential to the implementation of this tool in an interdisciplinary setting abroad. The survey was structured using a mixture of matrix questions, Likert scale questions, ranking questions, and open-ended questions. Questions covered topics such as environmental factors (e.g. time of day and location), group dynamics (e.g. group size and demographics) and level of familiarity with the tool. From the responses obtained, best practices are proposed to help enable future educators to utilize the CIA in a maximally impactful manner. Within this work, the authors will explore the usefulness of this tool as a metric to assess the sustainability of the electronics lifecycle in an International setting.

Korey, M., & Clarkson, C. M., & Frost, K. D., & Andler, J., & Wang, C., & Reeves, M. S., & Handwerker, C. A. (2020, June), Critical Incident Assessment as a Tool to Reflect on Students' Emotional Responses During International Experiences Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34355

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