Global Competency: Are Engineering Students Ready?

Increasingly, successful entry into the engineering and technology professions requires students to have “global competency” or significant cross-cultural skills, in order for them to collaborate effectively with colleagues from diverse backgrounds. In 2005, the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) initiated a Master Strategic Plan that established overarching strategies to guide the university as it embarked on its next quarter century of operations. A key initiative of the Master Strategic Plan was revisiting NYIT’s core curriculum, created to provide students with an outcomes-oriented education that would prepare them for today’s workforce and easy entry into the global market. The “Discovery Core” focuses on specific foundations that are necessary for success in every profession, including skills in communications, critical and analytical thinking, an interdisciplinary mindset, ethical and civic engagement, knowledge of the arts and sciences. One of its main learning criteria is a global perspective where “students can identify interdependencies among cultures and are able to collaborate effectively, and participate in global social and business settings”. All academic departments at NYIT are expected to reinforce these core competencies in the courses specific to their programs. In engineering, global competency has never been an explicit ABET Student Outcome (SO) for any of the engineering programs, except in outcome (h): “The broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context”. In a paper presented at the 2012 ASEE PSW Conference, Dianne J. DeTurris, took a broader interpretation of the familiar ABET SOs, “a to k”, to allow for an implicit recognition of this goal, when taking into account “what forms of knowledge, sets of capabilities and learning experiences are needed to prepare engineering students for work”. This paper expands on the work of DeTurris and links the global perspective learning criterion of the Discovery Core Curriculum to the ABET engineering SOs as well as to intercultural competency metrics, and illustrates the assessment of this learning criterion and the performance criteria of the SOs. It also establishes a set of “Appropriate Performance Tasks, (APTs)” in specific courses to foster cross-cultural interactions among students in order to assess global competency. The paper also covers rubrics used for this purpose.