Development of a Scale for Measuring Students’ Attitudes Towards Learning Professional (i.e., Soft) Skills

Higher education and science popularization: Can they achieve coordinated growth?

“…Firstly, science popularization increases gender inequality in higher education systems; it is found that science popularization has different impacts on different genders, and female students are less interested in science popularization activities than male students so that gender imbalance caused by science popularization may occur and higher education competitiveness, which requires gender equality, is likely to decline [ 10 , 34 , 35 ]. Secondly, lacking sufficient focus on science popularization is likely to decrease higher education competitiveness; science popularization activities are good opportunities for students to learn new skills or knowledge, and lacking enough related activities reduces studying chances and competitiveness of college students, which in turn reduces higher education competitiveness [ 36 ]. It is also found that some science popularization activities may make students feel boring or lost [ 29 ].…”

Measuring professional skills misalignment based on early-career engineers’ perceptions of engineering expertise

“…Gilbuena et al (2015) exemplified how this enculturation into communities of practice can start already during education through feedback on professional skills situated in senior design capstone courses. As such, effective attitude change strategies must be built on an understanding of the more frequent initial career tracks of students in any programme because attitude is essential to learning professional skills (Byrne et al 2018).…”

“…Therefore, this study focuses on measuring practicing early engineers' perceptions of engineering expertise as a whole rather than on measuring students' perceptions of separate skills for practice (c.f. Byrne, Weston, and Cave 2018;Shuman, Besterfield-Sacre, and McGourty 2005). It aims to investigate differences in how early engineers in different practice-roles but from the same educational background understand engineering expertise.…”

Board 89: What Engineering Students Think About How They Learn Professional Skills

“…Although other engineering programs around the world have worked to implement curricula designed to help students develop these professional skills, the effectiveness of these programs depends on the quality of the program and the desire of the students to learn these skills [7]. Furthermore, traditional engineering education largely focuses on science, technology, and mathematics as its core content [8], but an emphasis on technical skills combined with a lack of in-class time spent on professional development inadvertently sends the message that professional skills, such as communication and leadership, are not essential components of the engineering profession [7]. Despite this lack of attention paid to professional development in education, professional skills have become even more valuable than ever before as engineers are expected to work in diverse and interdisciplinary teams [9].…”