2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

What leadership capabilities do students in an experiential leadership course choose to explore, and how much growth do they report?

Presented at Engineering Leadership Identity and Skill Development

This project investigates leadership capability development of students enrolled in an experiential leadership course at a large public university in the central U.S. Building on work previously reported, the research identifies the leadership capabilities students in the course chose to explore and examined the self-reported growth these students experienced in the capabilities. Students evaluate their competence level using revised Bloom’s Taxonomy at the beginning and the end of the course. One hundred fifty-five (155) students majoring in engineering and related fields took the course during the study period, and 16 consented to participate. Thirty-two student-written reports (two from each student) were collected from four semesters between 2022 and 2025. Data from the reports were analyzed to tabulate the specific capabilities chosen and to measure students’ self-reported growth according to the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy. The findings will establish a basis for the next phase of the research, a qualitative analysis of contributing factors, lessons learned, and the contribution of students’ experiences to their engineering leadership identity development. This project is aligned with the Engineering Leadership Development Division’s foci of “Design” and “Assess.”

Authors

Miss Mawi Montell Camacho University of Oklahoma [biography]

Mawi Montell Camacho is a sophomore at the University of Oklahoma majoring in Industrial and Systems Engineering. She is actively involved in a variety of programs and student organizations such as Engineering Broader Impacts, Engineering Pathways, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, and the Venezuelan Association. Her interests center on empowering engineering communities and engineering education. Currently she is working as an undergraduate research assistant under Dr. Kim Graves Wolfinbarger. She holds an Associate of Arts from Lone Star College and is on track to graduate early with a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering in December 2027 at OU.
Dr. Kim Graves Wolfinbarger http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-4595-5674 The University of Oklahoma [biography]

Kim Graves Wolfinbarger is the director of the Jerry Holmes Leadership Program for Engineers and Scientists and an associate professor in the Engineering Pathways program at the University of Oklahoma. Her research explores leadership development among students majoring in engineering and related sciences. Dr. Wolfinbarger holds a PhD in Industrial & Systems Engineering, an MS in Industrial Engineering, and a BBA in Marketing, all from OU.

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