2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the increasing globalization of engineering work, it is important that engineering students have opportunities to develop global competence during their undergraduate programs. However, engineering students have historically been underrepresented in study abroad experiences. Although participation has improved in recent years, there remains a need to improve access to study abroad opportunities for engineering students (Jesiek, 2018). Several reasons have been proposed for this gap, including a lack of a tradition of studying abroad in engineering, lack of support from faculty or colleges of engineering, and curricular rigidity that doesn’t allow students to go abroad (Grandin & Hirleman, 2009; Parkinson, 2007). Though curricular rigidity is frequently mentioned as a barrier in the literature and anecdotally referenced by many students, little research has explored the relationship between curricular structure and study abroad participation. The recent development of a tool for measuring curriculum complexity (Heileman et al., 2017) provides a practical approach for exploring this question.

The purpose of our study is to explore the relationship between curriculum complexity and study abroad participation across 48 majors at one large research institution. To accomplish this goal, we first obtained data on study abroad participation for the years 2008-2018. We then identified the 48 largest majors at the university and entered their plans of study into the curriculum complexity online calculator to obtain a curriculum complexity score for each major. For majors that had significant changes in their plan of study during this time range, we entered the plan of study both before and after the change and averaged the curriculum complexity scores. We will next conduct correlation analyses to identify relationships between the curriculum complexity for these majors and students’ participation in study abroad. We will also explore changes in study abroad participation over time (which are notable in some majors) and seek to understand programmatic factors that could explain these shifts. Our project can provide insights to engineering programs seeking to improve study abroad participation about the challenges that may arise from curriculum complexity and what strategies may help address this issue.