2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this work is to determine if global engagement interventions without extended international travel can help engineering students develop a global learner mindset and build towards the overarching goal of developing a holistic global engineering educational approach to meet the current and future needs of the engineering profession. The global learner mindset refers to how engineers perceive and interpret the global environment. This mindset is considered foundational for developing global engineering competence, influencing how engineers define problems and formulate and implement solutions. This project has focused on assessing the global learner mindset elements, which include cultural humility, global citizenship, and critical reflection within the context of four distinctly different global engagement interventions. These interventions include international engineering case studies in a quantitative analysis course, intentional formation of multi-national student teams within a capstone design course, a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) research project in a fluid flow course, and an engineering short course coupled to a community engaged project.

The PIs conducted pilot implementations of the four interventions during the spring 2023 semester and collected pre and post assessment data from the Global Engagement Survey (GES) and Global Engineering Competency Scale (GECS) instruments. The results have been used to determine a path forward to improve the next implementation of the interventions during the Spring 2024 semester. This path includes the development of a focus group with students participating in each intervention to obtain a deeper understanding through qualitative data analysis, specifically targeting global engineering mindset formation that will help better contextualize the quantitative results from the GES and GECS instruments.

This work aspires to expand the required development of global competencies in engineering beyond the current research focused on the development of intercultural competence in international or study-abroad experiences. Our focus is on the development of a holistic global engineering education process able to reach all engineering students even when institutions are not able to provide opportunities to fully immerse in other cultures, either because of global crises (such as a pandemic or violent conflicts), financial limitations, or the need for more sustainable methods of globally connecting.