2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A national task force organized by the American Society for Engineering Education and National Academy of Engineering with support from the National Science Foundation recently made a call for change in undergraduate engineering and engineering technology education through the Engineering Mindset Report (2024). In this report, Recommendation 1.5 stated that programs should “Create student-centered paid internship and co-op programs integrated into engineering curricula that encourage, support, and recognize the value of work experiences.” Despite this call and continued calls for experiential learning in engineering, there has been less work dedicated to understanding technical learning during work-integrated cooperative learning experiences. Notably, in a review of the cooperative education literature published in the American Society of Engineering Education only one of almost 100 papers focused on students’ technical learning of statics concepts during a cooperative learning experience. While it is important to emphasize professional skills, it is also important that engineering students graduate with strong technical skills and understanding of how these technical skills will apply in the workforce. Therefore, it is critical to explore students’ perception of technical learning in the broader context of work-integrated learning.

The purpose of this work-in-progress paper is to explore students' perceptions of technical knowledge, skills, and attributes at the beginning of an innovative work-integrated learning program. This work-in-progress focuses on semi-structured interviews conducted with six students using the lens of the Knowledge, Skills, and Attributes (KSA) conceptual framework to explore students’ perceptions of technical learning. To explore students’ experiences in this program, we focused on the following research questions:
1) How do students describe their technical knowledge, skills, and attitudes during work-integrated learning?
2) What context do students draw from when they identify technical, knowledge, and attributes (KSAs)?

The preliminary results demonstrate that measuring technical learning in a work-integrated learning context adds additional complexity compared to traditional measurement and assessment of learning in the classroom context. Despite this complexity for students and researchers, students felt that they were doing both technical and professional learning at work. Students felt that work-integrated learning was more applied in comparison to their classroom learning. Furthermore, in terms of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, in our preliminary findings students’ were most easily able to identify technical skills at work. This demonstrates the importance of reflection and the role of facilitators, whether faculty or mentors, during work-integrated learning. Overall, our preliminary results demonstrated the need for importance of reflection of technical knowledge, skills, and attributes for engineering students. There is a need for additional research to investigate the underexplored area of technical learning in work-integrated learning and cooperative education environments. Lastly, we call on engineering practitioners and academic leaders to consider reflection on technical learning and the potential benefits of work-integrated learning.