Employers lament that science graduates, particularly engineering students, lack professional skills, despite increasing emphasis on teaching professional skills in their curriculum. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior as an overarching framework, one explanation for skill development gaps may be students’ attitude towards learning professional skills. Our study purpose was to create a scale that accurately and consistently measures engineering students’ attitudes towards learning professional skills. To create the scale, we used a rigorous measurement development methodology, beginning with survey item generation and critical review by subject matter experts. Data from a sample of 534 engineering college students were split into two sets to provide (1) a development sample upon which exploratory factor analyses and parallel analyses were conducted to form the initial scale, and (2) a confirmatory sample whereby we verified the scale structure and obtained initial validity evidence for distinct dimensions. A five-factor scale of 25 items for assessing engineering students’ attitudes towards learning professional skills (ATLPS) obtained high-reliability estimates. Validity evidence supported five distinct dimensions in leadership in teams, communication, civic and public engagement, cultural adaptability, and innovation. The ATLPS can be used to facilitate improvements in engineering education and research by understanding students’ attitudes towards learning professional skills. Furthermore, researchers can expand the scale to include additional dimensions of professionalism and modify items to fit STEM disciplines where professional skill training is essential.

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

Engineering education addresses the development of professional competencies in undergraduates. In this context, the core set of professional competencies includes critical thinking and problem solving, effective communication, collaboration and team building, and creativity and innovation—also known as the four Cs—as well as socio-professional ethics and sustainable development—referred in this paper as the two Ss. While the four Cs were identified by the associates of the American Management Association based on the needs of the society, professional associations, and businesses; this paper proposes the two S extension to ensure that future engineers contribute to the well-being of individuals and the preservation of life on Earth. It proposes a tangible framework—the 4C2S—and an application method to analyse the contributions made by engineering capstone programmes to the development of these core competencies in future engineering professionals. The method is applied to an engineering capstone programme—the European Project Semester (EPS) offered by the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP)—and a specific project case—EPS@ISEP Pet Tracker project developed in 2013, constituting, in addition, a road map for the application of the 4C2S framework to engineering capstone programmes. The results show that EPS@ISEP complies with the 4C2S framework.

/pdf/fostering-professional-competencies-in-engineering-189prz15by.pdf

Fostering Professional Competencies in Engineering Undergraduates with EPS@ISEP

In this paper, the authors present their experiences from participating in a National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps L training program established for business startups, using Blank’s Lean LaunchPad, Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, and associated tools. They used the entrepreneurial skills acquired through this training to scale-up their emerging innovation, the Cincinnati Engineering Enhanced Math and Science Program (CEEMS), which had been developed, implemented, and evaluated with successful results over a period of seven years in a targeted 14 school-district partnership in Greater Cincinnati. The overriding goal was to improve student learning and success rates in K–12 math and science courses by helping to accelerate the process of bringing effective educational innovation, CEEMS, to scale. In CEEMS, teachers were trained in using challenge-based learning (CBL) and the engineering design process (EDP), teaching pedagogies to transform their classrooms into student-centered, hands-on learning environments, while also assisting students to improve their evaluation scores related to science, math, and engineering instruction. CEEMS teachers acquired the necessary skills through coursework, professional development (PD) workshops, and longitudinal professional guidance provided by assigned coaches over a period of two years to become proficient in developing CBL–EDP curriculum, teaching it, and assessing student learning and reflecting after teaching. The authors have documented how they used customer market research conducted during the I-Corps L training to define their minimum viable product (MVP) to duplicate the successful CEEMS methodology through a condensed (≤16 week) self-paced, completely online training program with virtual coaching support. The authors also describe the process they used to move forward very quickly from an MVP to a more complete product offering, its branding, the process of trademarking it, and finally licensing it to an established non-profit organization (NPO) for future marketing. Details of the whole experience are presented with the hope that it will serve as a useful guide for other venture creators.

/pdf/an-entrepreneurship-venture-for-training-k-12-teachers-to-1bz1j1n7s1.pdf

An Entrepreneurship Venture for Training K–12 Teachers to Use Engineering as a Context for Learning

ABSTRACT Real-world design settings can be complex, ill-structured, open and typically uncertain and/or ambiguous about their goals and solution paths. This study contributes to understanding how to work with these types of problems in a course project setting. The main objective of the study is to identify, propose and validate a set of practical guidelines for dealing with ill-structured, open-problem project assignments in courses that teach design engineering or design development planning. A literature review identifies key practices for proposing the guidelines, which are then validated by intervening in an engineering project management master’s course. The intervention took place during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions with 12 project groups created from 105 enrolled students. During the validation, qualitative and quantitative feedback was gathered from the students, and the results provide positive evidence for achieving the objective. Key to this outcome was the combination of the self-regulation of learning, co-regulation of learning and socially shared regulation of learning. In this sense, the proposed guidelines look promising for redesigning university courses that deal with open problems, thus enhancing students’ capacity for handling uncertainty and ambiguity.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03043797.2023.2194850?needAccess=true&role=button

Guidelines for teaching with ill-structured real-world engineering problems: insights from a redesigned engineering project management course

The complex dimensions of many issues faced by engineers require that they understand social and humanistic matters along with the technical, and communicate effectively and synergistically with persons having all sorts of backgrounds. This is especially true for matters of sustainability and energy supply. Engineering should therefore be built upon the foundation of a broad and liberal undergraduate education, with the professional degree being moved to the graduate level, as is the case for the other major professions. Another benefit of moving the degree level can be to delay the point of commitment to an engineering major from before college to the latter part of the undergraduate program, a move which can bring in new enrollees and increase diversity. The move of the professional engineering degree to the graduate level has already happened for a number of European countries as an outgrowth of the Bologna Process. There are incremental changes that can be made so that this transition can be undertaken by evolution as opposed to revolution.

/pdf/a-liberal-undergraduate-education-for-engineers-ij2lkzt7bb.pdf

A Liberal Undergraduate Education for Engineers

/pdf/educating-the-engineer-of-2020-2juvdm3ckg.pdf

Educating the engineer of 2020

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Dyna Dyna

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

Educating the engineer of 2020