Building a better engineer and rounding out assessment: Student perceptions of their generic skills competency
Abstract
Within higher education engineering programs, there are several stakeholders that are vested in programs success, including students, faculty, and employers. Each of these stakeholders provide a different perspective of the assessment of the skills that engineering programs pursue to develop. Faculty seek to teach the necessary technical and soft skills to students. Employers hope to hire students that graduate from programs that have attained these skills. And students strive to develop and learn the necessary skills to be successful after graduation. Referred to as generic skills, are those skills that can be used in contexts beyond a specific discipline and are not isolated to knowledge within a particular academic or professional field (Bennett et al., 1999). Examples of these generic skills include academic and problem-solving skills, interpersonal skills, community and citizenship knowledge, leadership skills, professional effectiveness, information and communication literacy, critical thinking, and self-management skills (Chan et al., 2017). This study explored undergraduate engineering students' perceptions of their generic skills competency across academic grade level, pre-graduation engineering experiences, and individual demographics at a research university located in the Midwest. This study was accomplished using the Generic Skills Perception Questionnaire (GSPQ). Additional demographic data were also obtained. Overall, students perceived themselves as competent in both the technical and soft generic skills. Although differences were found among the academic grade level, only a few items were considered significantly different. Many of the skills indicated that students that have had pre-graduation engineering experiences saw themselves as significantly more competent than students without pre-graduation engineering experiences. Females indicated higher levels of perceived competency in several of the generic soft skills than their male counterparts. Additionally, the minority racial and ethnic students perceived themselves as more competent than their white peers for several of the generic soft skills. These findings have implications on theory, research, and practice and future research beyond this study can further explore student perceptions in order to build a better engineer.
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