NSF Award
2204956
Engineering students live and work in an increasing global environment. Graduates with experience in understanding, interacting with and valuing differing cultures have advantages in the workplace compared with those who will need to learn those skills post-graduation. This underlying global learner mindset is a key ingredient in cultivating a global engineering competency. Most intercultural competence research and associated global engineering education is focused on developing the global engineering skillset of students through long-term travel experiences such as study abroad programs. These programs can be expensive, requiring a significant investment of time and money, limiting the participation to more privileged members of a community, and are not scalable to support participation from large numbers of engineering students. The proposed work will fill a gap in the research by focusing on the development of the students’ global learner mindset without requiring extensive international travel. Specifically, the project will investigate how four different global engagement interventions (the use of engineering case studies, the intentional formation of multi-national student teams, a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) research project, and a community engaged project within a short course) can develop a global learner mindset. Four engineering educators who are new to the field of engineering formation research will be trained by social science and engineering education researchers in research methods in order to assess the global engagement interventions that will be developed and implemented in this study. This process aligns with the program’s goals of initiating new researchers into engineering formation research, and is instrumental in developing a holistic global engineering education approach. This work will foster global competence in undergraduate engineering students in order to meet the current and future needs of the engineering profession. <br/><br/>In this project, four global engagement interventions will be grounded in the Global Engineering Competency (GEC) theoretical framework and assessed for their ability to foster a global learner mindset in engineering students. A mixed-methods approach will be used to measure students’ cultural humility, global citizenship, and critical reflection as the key elements of the global learner mindset. The specific research questions to be answered are: 1) To what extent can global competence be developed in engineering students through the use of the proposed global engagement interventions; and 2) what are the relative strengths of each of the proposed global engagement interventions in developing global engineering competence? The specific assessment tools used to answer these research questions include the Global Engagement Survey (GES) and specific questions developed by the researchers to evaluate improvements in the participating students’ global engineering skillset. Combined, these research measures will provide not only an accurate picture of how each global engagement intervention impacts the formation of a global learner mindset in engineering education, but also its associated ability to develop and/or improve global engineering skills. The outcomes of this study will generate valuable knowledge to understand how each global engagement intervention impacts the formation of global engineering competence.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
