Preliminary Results of an NSF Sponsored Cross Institutional Study for Assessing the Spectrum of International Undergraduate Engineering Educational Experiences and IDI Results of Short-Term Study Abroad (University of Rhode Island)

Sigrid -- Berka; Anett Geithner; Eric Kaldor; Scott Streiner

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Conference: 2017 ASEE International Forum
Location: Columbus , Ohio
Publication Date: June 28, 2017
Start Date: June 28, 2017
End Date: June 28, 2017
Conference Session: Concurrent Paper Tracks Session II - Curriculum II
Tagged Topic: Main Forum (Podium Presentation)
Page Count: 11
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--29293
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/29293
Download Count: 299

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Paper Authors

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Sigrid -- Berka University of Rhode Island

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Dr. Sigrid Berka is the Executive Director of the International Engineering Program (IEP) at the University of Rhode Island, and also the Director of the German and the Chinese IEP, responsible for building academic programs with exchange partners abroad, internship placements for IEP’s dual degree students, corporate relations and fundraising for the IEP. Bi-annually, the IEP organizes the Colloquium on International Engineering Education. Under Sigrid’s leadership, the IEP received NAFSA’s Senator Paul Simon Spotlight Award for innovative campus internationalization (2011), and the Andrew Heiskell Award for an innovative study abroad program (2012) by the Institute for International Education. She was Co-PI of the winning grant proposal (PI Megan Echevarría) chosen as one of four to launch President Obama’s 100,000 Strong Initiative in the Americas (2014). Sigrid serves as Co-Editor, with Damon Rarick, of the Online Journal for Global Engineering Education (OJGEE) as well as on the Provost’s Global Education Steering Committee. She also serves on the DAAD Alumni Association Board. Since she began working at URI in 2009, the IEP has seen an enrollment increase of 18 % and added an Italian branch. Sigrid has raised close to a million dollars in corporate, foundation, government and private funds for the IEP. She held prior positions as Coordinator, then Managing Director of the MIT Germany Program (1996-2009) and as Assistant Professor of German Studies at Barnard College (1990-96). She has published a book and numerous articles on 19th and 20th German Literature, co-authored an intermediate German textbook, and has more recently published several articles in the area of International Engineering Education.

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Anett Geithner University of Rhode Island; DAAD

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Anett Geithner teaches German language, literature and film classes in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Rhode Island where she has been working as a fulltime lecturer since fall 2013 on behalf of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She studied English, Russian and German as a Foreign Language in Germany and the UK, and worked worldwide as a language instructor e.g. in Bangalore, India, in Odessa, Ukraine, and at Technische Hochschule Brandenburg, Germany.
Her research interests include Content and Language Integrated Teaching, Online and Hybrid Education, Intercultural Competence Development, and Contemporary German Literature and Film. Her teaching interests focus on Foreign Language Teaching Methodology, German for professional purposes (e.g. Engineering), and German as a Second Language.

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Eric Kaldor University of Rhode Island

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Eric Kaldor serves as Assistant Director for Faculty Development in the Office for the Advancement of Teaching & Learning at URI. He received his Ph.D. in 2005 from Rutgers University in economic and organizational sociology. In addition to Introduction to Sociology, he has taught courses around globalization and development, work and organizations, sociology of money, and sociological theory. He became a qualified administrator for the Intercultural Development Inventory in 2013 and has used the instrument with students and departments at various institutions to assess programs, improve workplace awareness, and help individual develop their intercultural understanding and orientation.

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Scott Streiner University of Pittsburgh

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Scott Streiner is a Ph.D. candidate in the Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include engineering global competency, curricula ad assessment; evidence based teaching practices and curricular innovations applied to misconceptions; and engineering education policy. His research explores the nature of global competency development by assessing how international experiences improve the global perspectives of engineering students. His dissertation investigates how best to design and operationalize effective global programming strategies within engineering curricula.

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Abstract

University XX participated in an NSF sponsored cross institutional study for assessing the spectrum of international undergraduate engineering educational experiences. XX was one of eleven schools that participated in the spring of 2016 (several more schools will be added in Fall 2016). The PIs formed a multidisciplinary team from four universities (Y1, Y2, Y3 and Y4) which investigates how the broad spectrum of international experiences both in and outside of formal curricula impact engineering students’ global preparedness. Its four major objectives are delineated into three separate, but interconnected studies (i.e., Delphi, mixed-methods, and cross-institutional) combined with a dissemination system. The author presents an analysis of the preliminary University XX results of the third study within this work, an in-depth study to analyze engineering students’ global preparedness as the result of their academic and non-academic international experiences.

The instrument of the Global Perspective Inventory (GPI) was used to compare GPI scores of engineering freshmen and seniors with and without international experiences. We are reporting on the preliminary analysis of data of University XX provided by one of the PIs. According to those data, University xx students turned out to have some of the highest Global Perspective Inventory (GPI) scores across all 11 schools for senior students who only had international experiences during college and for seniors who have had experience both before and during college. When comparing the GPI scores at XX who have never had an international experience to those students who only had experiences in college, one can see a large effect of the international experiences that students are having during their college years. Across all three GPI dimensions, the effect sizes (measured by Cohen’s D) are all large (above 0.80) and are consistently higher than the other schools in the study. The effect sizes for the XX students in this category are also the most consistent across all GPI dimensions. In other words, while some schools might have had larger effect sizes in certain GPI dimensions, XX is the only school in the sample that have statistically large effect sizes across all dimensions of the GPI when comparing seniors with no experience to seniors with experience before and during college.

Can we conclude from these results that the efficacy of the international programs and opportunities that XX offers its engineering student population is very high? What sort of programming might have led to the strong scores? How might the different types of experiences offered at XX relate to students’ global perspectives?

Citation
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Berka, S., & Geithner, A., & Kaldor, E., & Streiner, S. (2017, June), Preliminary Results of an NSF Sponsored Cross Institutional Study for Assessing the Spectrum of International Undergraduate Engineering Educational Experiences and IDI Results of Short-Term Study Abroad (University of Rhode Island) Paper presented at 2017 ASEE International Forum, Columbus , Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--29293

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - University XX participated in an NSF sponsored cross institutional study for assessing the spectrum of international undergraduate engineering educational experiences.  XX was one of eleven schools that participated in the spring of 2016 (several more schools will be added in Fall 2016). The PIs formed a multidisciplinary team from four universities (Y1, Y2, Y3 and Y4) which investigates how the broad spectrum of international experiences both in and outside of formal curricula impact engineering students’ global preparedness.  Its four major objectives are delineated into three separate, but interconnected studies (i.e., Delphi, mixed-methods, and cross-institutional) combined with a dissemination system. The author presents an analysis of the preliminary University XX results of the third study within this work, an in-depth study to analyze engineering students’ global preparedness as the result of their academic and non-academic international experiences.  

The instrument of the Global Perspective Inventory (GPI) was used to compare GPI scores of engineering freshmen and seniors with and without international experiences. We are reporting on the preliminary analysis of data of University XX provided by one of the PIs. According to those data, University xx students turned out to have some of the highest Global Perspective Inventory (GPI) scores across all 11 schools for senior students who only had international experiences during college and for seniors who have had experience both before and during college. When comparing the GPI scores at XX who have never had an international experience to those students who only had experiences in college, one can see a large effect of the international experiences that students are having during their college years. Across all three GPI dimensions, the effect sizes (measured by Cohen’s D) are all large (above 0.80) and are consistently higher than the other schools in the study.  The effect sizes for the XX students in this category are also the most consistent across all GPI dimensions. In other words, while some schools might have had larger effect sizes in certain GPI dimensions,  XX is the only school in the sample that have statistically large effect sizes across all dimensions of the GPI when comparing seniors with no experience to seniors with experience before and during college. 

Can we conclude from these results that the efficacy of the international programs and opportunities that XX offers its engineering student population is very high? What sort of programming might have led to the strong scores? How might the different types of experiences offered at XX relate to students’ global perspectives?

AU  - Sigrid -- Berka
AU  - Anett Geithner
AU  - Eric Kaldor
AU  - Scott Streiner
CY  - Columbus , Ohio
DA  - 2017/06/28
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Preliminary Results of an NSF Sponsored Cross Institutional Study for Assessing the Spectrum of International Undergraduate Engineering Educational Experiences and IDI Results of Short-Term Study Abroad (University of Rhode Island)
UR  - https://strategy.asee.org/29293
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--29293
ER  -