Measuring intercultural sensitivity: A case study of the REU program at UPRM

The National Academy of Engineering’s call to educate global engineers has sparked a number of globalizing programs and coursework at different institutions. Nevertheless, there is a need to quantify the extent to which the ability of recent graduates to understand, appreciate, and accept differences among cultures is being influenced by globalizing programs and coursework. In other words, how do these emerging programs improve the intercultural sensitivity scale of engineering graduates? In 2009, NSF funded a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM) named Educating a culturallysensitive Industrial Engineer: A complex interdisciplinary systems perspective to global IE issues. The summer component of this REU site takes advantage of the unique location of Puerto Rico, with a distinct Hispanic-Caribbean culture and a highly industrialized manufacturing environment, to expose intercultural teams of participants to some of the challenges associated with working in a global economy. In addition to research activities, this REU includes cultural and professional activities aimed at providing students with an opportunity to foster their culturally-sensitive management skills. By the end of the summer internship, students gained not only critical scientific knowledge and expertise in different research areas, but also the experience of working in intercultural teams. Nevertheless, did this exhaustive intercultural program have an effect in the students’ intercultural skills? Are there any differences in the way it impacted students coming from USbased institution versus the way it impacted UPRM students? To answer all these questions, we used the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ICSS) by Chen and Starosta on a cohort of 43 students from the 2010-2012 UPRM-REU summer programs. Feature selection, using analysis of variance, indicates that the factors that contribute more heavily toward changes in the students’ intercultural sensitivity are (1) the experience of going through the REU summer program and (2) whether the student went to school at UPRM or not. Both of these factors also have a statistically significant two-way interaction with the different ICSS constructs. Non-parametric paired analyses were used to test whether the experience had a positive effect in the participant’s intercultural scale. At a 0.05 significant level, every REU summer program was able to trigger a statistically significant improvement in the interaction confidence and interaction enjoyment constructs of the ICSS. Overall, the REU program also had a statistically significant (α = 0.05) effect in the interaction engagement and respect for cultural differences constructs of the ICSS. Lastly, results indicate that the UPRM program has been responsible for the overall improvement in the intercultural sensitivity scale of 21 participants of the REU program.