2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Instilling professionalism and teamwork in the large Statics course

Presented at Effective Teaching Potpourri

With the rapidly changing world and workspace, the goal of undergraduate engineering education has evolved to educate students to be self-regulated with characteristics and skillsets for meeting the profession’s needs. To meet the goal, multiple institutions such as ASCE, ABET, and NACE developed criteria and competencies to instill engineering curriculum, including professionalism, teamwork, communication skills, and others. Typically, such competencies are actively incorporated into senior capstone project courses, however, students need to acquire such behaviors much earlier in their curriculum to succeed in their coursework, secure internships, and be successful in undergraduate research. This paper describes the process of instilling major competencies of ABET and NACE in the large Statics course. Among 7 different NACE competencies, teamwork, professionalism, and career and self-development competencies were adopted in the Statics curriculum to introduce and initiate the process of growing such competencies during their academic college life. Multiple interventions were introduced in the Spring and Fall of 2024; for the teamwork competency, weekly teamwork activities to solve and create Statics problems and reflection on their teamwork were used; for the career and self-development competencies, two Blackboard career development modules, and discussion board activities to write the elevator pitch and career fair reflection were used; for the professionalism and self-regulated learning, weekly clicker reflections of the muddiest points, exam problem creations, in-exam self-evaluation, and post-exam analysis and self-reflection were used. The outcome of this paper was assessed by student evaluation of teaching, in-class semester reflections, and Qualtric pre and post surveys based on a meta-cognition and self efficacy instruments.

Authors

Prof. Shinae Jang http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3559-8762 University of Connecticut [biography]

Dr. Shinae Jang is a Professor in Residence of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut (UConn). She earned a BS and MS degrees in Civil Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She joined UConn in 2010, and her major effort is to develop undergraduate students’ academic and professional skills, serving as proud faculty advisor of the ASCE student chapter, honors advisor, and faculty career fellow. Dr. Jang’s research interests include smart structures, structural health monitoring, wireless sensor networks, and engineering education. She has taught multiple undergraduate and graduate courses including Statics, Structural Analysis, Senior Design, Structural Health Monitoring and Sensors, and others. Dr. Jang is the recipient of the 2021 Emerging Leader Fellow Award from the ASEE Civil Engineering Division (CIV), the 2021 Distinguished Engineering Educator Award from UConn, and the 2018 Civil Engineering Educator of the Year award from the Connecticut Society of Civil Engineers. She has served as the ASEE CIV Newsletter Editor since 2021 and is a registered Professional Engineer of Connecticut.
Christa L. Taylor University of Connecticut [biography]

Christa L. Taylor, Ph.D., is an Independent Research Consultant and Research Affiliate with the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. Her research is focused on issues in creativity, social cognition, and neurodiversity. She received a Ph.D. in Social-Personality Psychology from the University at Albany, State University of New York before completing postdoctoral work at Yale University and Université catholique du Louvain in Belgium.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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