Self Perceptions of Students’ Humanities-Based Skills in an Engineering Program: Overview of First Year Results

Abstract

Demonstrating and improving assessment of humanities-based graduate attributes can be challenging, as there are no easy metrics in order to do so. Engineering programs offer curricular and co-curricular programming in order to improve these attributes in their students and still find it challenging to determine if those initiatives are in fact effective. To those ends, in order to assess engineering accreditation humanities-based skills, a threeyear longitudinal study was implemented at a medium sized engineering school at a large research university. In particular, the survey focuses on engineering students selfperceptions of teamwork, communication skills, engineering ethics, professionalism, and lifelong learning in order to gather quantitative data that can be analysed for trends. This paper overviews the data gathered in the first year of the longitudinal study and offer preliminary explanations of those results and what they can offer to our understanding of humanities-based graduate attributes offered in our engineering programs.

Self Perceptions of Students’ Humanities-Based Skills in an Engineering Program: Overview of a Longitudinal Study’s First Two Years (2017-2019)

“…They disagree that they struggle to deal with conflict within their teams. This pattern was very similar in the results from 2017-2018 [3], though no increase from year to year was observable then. Figure 2 shows participants' self-efficacy beliefs of their leadership abilities.…”

“…This progressive divergence between the rankings of the positively and negatively worded statements as students progress in their programs was also observed in the data for 2017-2018 [3]. In terms of professionalism, participants ranked themselves consistently between agree and strongly agree in terms of their beliefs that they must contribute to a solution to a problem, even if they are not at fault (see Figure 4).…”

“…The research design and methods in the 2018-2019 data collection were very similar to the 2017-2018 data collection [3]. Two phases of data collection in the second year of the study were used.…”

“…The survey used was the same as was used in the 2017-2018 data collection to understand participants' selfefficacy of humanities-based graduate attributes, as one indicator of competency. [3]. The online survey was comprised of 14 Likert-style questions on a 4-point scale, (4 = strongly agree, 3 = agree, 2= disagree, 1= strongly disagree), about the following attributes: Teamwork, Leadership, Ethics, Professionalism, Lifelong Learning, Community Responsibility, and Communication Skills.…”

“…At the time of the writing of this paper, the longitudinal study data collection for all three years has just completed, but researchers only have access to the data from the first two years. This paper is a follow up to a CEEA paper on the first year of data [3], so the focus of this paper will be limited to the results of the second year, . Some comparisons will be made to first year results; however, these observations will be limited until all three years of data can be analyzed.…”