2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There are few measures to evaluate whether engineering students have the interpersonal skills that lead to effective teamwork. Many interventions that putatively teach interpersonal skills use team-level outcomes such as psychological safety to measure effectiveness instead of assessing skills themselves. To address this gap, we created and evaluated a Teamwork-in-Engineering-Education Situational Judgment Test (TEE-SJT). This situational judgment test presents conflict-driven scenarios to students and elicits responses about how they would act. Students respond to multiple-choice questions, which are graded according to a rubric. The TEE-SJT was developed using expert guidance and input from professors and students. To test the construct validity of the TEE-SJT, we used Westen and Rosenthal’s Quantifying Construct Validity (QCV) procedure, which jointly tests convergent and discriminant validity and outputs two precise effect sizes of construct validity. We hypothesized that both effect sizes would exceed .60. The hypotheses were pre-registered before data collection. Predicted convergent and discriminant correlations between the test and criterion variables were also preregistered. The criterion variables included Big Five trait facets (e.g., deliberation, empathy, anger proneness) and other constructs (e.g., need for closure, social dominance orientation). As hypothesized, the first construct validity effect size (r-alerting) was positive (.77) and greater than .60. The second effect size (r-contrast) was .55 but its 95% CI [.44, .64] included .60. These results indicate good construct validity. Serendipitously, the test was more responsive to variation in deliberation and honesty-humility than predicted. Further testing is needed to determine the predictive validity of the test.