2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Internships or co-operative learning experiences have proven a value for young professionals or students to gain hands-on experience and knowledge in their chosen degree and career path. Companies find value in this process as a process to identify potential candidates that would be suitable to hire as careered paid positions within the company and in many cases provide the opportunity to hire the student prior to their graduation. Construction management academia also finds value through the internship process to help validate the theory disseminated in construction courses. This paper is a pilot study that attempts to understand how the American Council for Construction Education (ACCE) student learning objectives (SLOs) can be used as a framework to identify knowledge being acquired during the summer internship process. Each of the ACCE SLOs are a specific construction management knowledge content area students must know upon their graduation from their chosen University. Through a quasi-experimental process, the researcher collected data using a learning management system (LMS) to group, classify, and assess the areas students are mostly engaged with while actively participating in their internship. Findings from this assessment strategy show the knowledge areas students are mostly engaged with during the internship include the process of creating communications, presentations, safety plans, estimates, and schedules on actual construction projects.