WIP: Think-Aloud Interviews for Assessment of Engineering Students’ Opportunities to Practice Professional Skills
- Conference
- Location
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Minneapolis, MN
- Publication Date
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August 23, 2022
- Start Date
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June 26, 2022
- End Date
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June 29, 2022
- Conference Session
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ERM: Student Professional Development: Professional Skills and Moving Beyond the Classroom
- Page Count
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9
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--41064
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/41064
- Download Count
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357
Paper Authors
Tiantian Li Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)
Tiantian Li (Olivia) is a PhD student in Engineering Education at Purdue University. She is a Purdue graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Engineering, with a concentration in Pharmaceutical Processing Engineering. She has completed Purdue’s Certificate of Systems Engineering and Quantitative Research, Assessment, and Evaluation in Education Certificate. Her research interest is in the assessment of systems thinking skills and systems awareness. She is also interested in studying international scholars' experience within engineering.
Eric Holloway Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)
Kerrie Douglas Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE)
Dr. Kerrie Douglas, Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue, studies how to improve the quality of classroom assessments and evaluation of online learning in a variety of engineering education contexts. She holds a PhD in Educational Psychology and a M.A. in Educational Studies, with focus on school counseling. She is a co-PI on the SCALE project, leading the evaluation and assessment efforts. She recently received an NSF award to study engineering instructor decisions and student support during COVID-19 and impact the pandemic is having on engineering students. She also recently won the prestigious CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation to study increasing the fairness of engineering assessments. In total, she has been on the leadership of more than $24 million dollars in research awards. Her research on evaluation of online learning (supported by two NSF awards #1544259,1935683, ) has resulted in more than 20 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications related to engineering learners in online courses. She was a FutureLearn Research Fellow from 2017-2019; a 2018 recipient of the FIE New Faculty Fellow Award and was the 2021 Program Chair for the Educational Research Methods Division of ASEE.
Julie Martin The Ohio State University
Julie P. Martin is a Fellow of ASEE and an associate professor of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. Julie’s professional mission is to create environments that elevate and expand the research community. She is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, where her vision is to create a culture of constructive peer review in academic publishing. Julie is a former NSF program director for engineering education and frequently works with faculty to help them write proposals and navigate the proposal preparation and grant management processes. She was a 2009 NSF CAREER awardee for her work operationalizing social capital for engineering education. More recently, Julie has encouraged the engineering education research community to embrace methodological activism, a paradigm whereby researchers intentionally choose methods for the political purpose of empowering marginalized populations. Learn more about her research team, Elevate, at juliepmartin.com.
Victoria Bill New York University Tandon School of Engineering
Victoria Bill is the Managing Director of the MakerSpace Lab & Experiential Learning Center at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. She is also an adjunct professor in the first-year engineering and VIP programs, as well as a PhD student in Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. Her research interests include asset-based professional and technical skill development of engineers through extracurricular and co-curricular activities.
Abstract
As the need for interdisciplinary collaboration increases, industry needs engineers who are not only affluent in technical engineering skills but also efficient in skills such as communication, problem-solving, engineering ethics, and business management. As a result, engineering programs are tasked with providing students with sufficient opportunities to develop non-technical professional skills to better prepare them for the workforce. Previous research has focused on exploring how and where students tend to develop profession skills and assessments have been established to measure the level of professional skills. However, without a means to measure whether students are getting sufficient opportunities for development, it is hard for educators and engineering programs to determine whether or where scaffoldings are needed. We developed an instrument to assess undergraduate engineering students’ opportunities for professional skill development. To increase content validity, we conducted 20 think-aloud interviews with students from a large Midwestern university. The aim of this WIP is two-fold. We present the preliminary results of the think-aloud interview to determine what changes need to be made to existing items and what emerging themes appear regarding to participants’ professional skill development opportunities. After thematic analysis of the interview transcripts, we revised 10 items by simplifying the grammar or altering certain words that tend to confuse participants or carry negative connotations. We found that, compared to students who have only been involved in class projects, those with co-curricular experiences tend to report more opportunities in skills related to business management principles and problem-solving skills. Co-curricular activities were also the most referenced in building communication skills. Our next step will be piloting the instrument across multiple institutions and conducting validation analysis.
Li, T., & Holloway, E., & Douglas, K., & Martin, J., & Bill, V. (2022, August), WIP: Think-Aloud Interviews for Assessment of Engineering Students’ Opportunities to Practice Professional Skills Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41064
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