AC 2012-3116: DEVELOPING A MEASURE OF INTERDISCIPLINARY COMPETENCE FOR ENGINEERS

The National Academy of Engineering’s Engineer of 2020 strongly encourages colleges and universities to prepare engineers who understand that engineering problems – as well as their solutions – are embedded in complex social, cultural, political, environmental, and economic contexts. Developing solutions that account for this enlarged problem space require engineers to access, understand, evaluate, synthesize, and apply information and knowledge from engineering as well as other fields of study. Researchers are just beginning to examine how engineering students learn to synthesize and use knowledge from different fields, and few tools have been developed to date to assess such interdisciplinary learning. In this paper we describe the development and testing of a measure of interdisciplinary competence. We identify eight dimensions of interdisciplinary competence that emerged from an extensive literature review: 1) awareness of disciplinarity; 2) appreciation of disciplinary perspectives; 3) appreciation of non-disciplinary perspectives; 4) recognition of disciplinary limitations; 5) interdisciplinary evaluation; 6) ability to find common ground; 7) reflexivity; and 8) integrative skill. We next describe how these dimensions were operationalized as a set of survey items, refined through focus groups with engineering faculty, and pilot tested. Following this development process, the items were administered to undergraduates in 30 U.S. engineering schools as part of an NSF-funded study entitled, Prototype to Production: Processes and Conditions for Preparing the Engineer of 2020. The paper next presents information on the formation of (using factor analysis) and descriptive characteristics (e.g., reliabilities) of the three interdisciplinary competence scales that emerged from this process. Additional analyses demonstrate the ability of the scales to distinguish among students in different class years and engineering disciplines.