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Engineering employers, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the engineering accreditation agency ABET continue to identify communication and teamwork as essential for engineering graduates going into professional practice. The desire for students to enhance these and other professional skills has led to an increase in the number of team projects and communication assignments included within engineering courses. However, educational researchers and educators alike know comparatively little about the beliefs and values of current engineering faculty with respect to communication and teamwork, or about how these faculty epistemologies affect approaches to incorporating and evaluating these skills. To address this gap, this paper analyzes data from interview with engineering faculty in light of published criteria for communication and teamwork. As our benchmark for this initial study, we use the VALUE rubrics developed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU). Preliminary analysis of a subset of the data suggests areas of both alignment and disparity between engineering faculty and the VALUE rubrics. In particular, engineering faculty beliefs align with the rubrics’ emphasis on context and purpose and content development in written communication, but reflect less attention to disciplinary genre conventions and sources. In the teamwork domain, engineering faculty recognize the importance of conflict resolution, but offer few other criteria included in the VALUE rubric. At the same time, faculty emphasize the importance of distributing workload and managing the project effectively, an area not wellrepresented by the rubrics. These findings, once refined through analysis of the full data set, offer areas for faculty development, but also suggest important discipline-specific adaptations of the broad-based VALUE rubrics. Introduction: Why Faculty Beliefs Matter Communication and teamwork remain top-priority outcomes for engineering graduates in both academic and industry settings, and they are increasingly integrated into engineering curricula, not only through external course requirements (e.g. technical writing courses), but also within engineering courses. As Shuman et al. 1 argue in their landmark 2005 review of professional skills, both communication and teamwork can be effectively taught within engineering courses, and engineering education research is rich with discussions of both skills 2, 3-10 . Importantly, both skills have strong pedagogical research bases outside and inside engineering. Work on engineering communication as a domain within English dates back to the late 1800s, and technical communication has developed into an important subfield of writing studies. Moreover, recent engineering education literature contains numerous accounts of courses that address communication skills in engineering contexts. Work on teamwork is more recent, dating back to the 1950s, with more attention focused on the creation and function of effective teams than on the development of team skills in educational environments. Still, the engineering education literature again includes numerous accounts of strategies for incorporating teams into courses (particularly at the capstone level), along with multiple studies of engineering team dynamics. Despite the depth of research on both communication and teamwork, what remains unclear is the degree to which engineering faculty engage with and leverage this rich literature. With respect to communication, some researchers have explored differences in feedback patterns between engineering faculty and writing faculty 11, 12 or explored beliefs about writing among disciplinary faculty more generally 13, 14 , and the findings suggest both intersections and gaps between faculty with writing expertise and those with expertise in disciplinary content. But little research has considered the relationship between faculty beliefs about effective communication and broadly accepted criteria developed and published by scholars in writing and oral communication. Similarly, although research on assessing teamwork has been increasing in recent years 5, 15-18 , little work explores the degree to which faculty accept and/or apply criteria developed by teamwork researchers when teaching and evaluating student performance. We argue here that identifying both the intersections and the gaps between faculty beliefs and current research with respect to these two core skills is essential if we hope to provide more effective learning environments for students. Only by better understanding what faculty do believe about effective communication and effective teamwork can we more fully support those beliefs that are grounded in empirical research and address gaps or correct misconceptions. To do so, this paper explores the research following research question: How do faculty beliefs about effective communication and effective teamwork align with empirically based criteria for these two skills? As a first step toward this question, this paper presents preliminary findings from a larger mixed methods study exploring faculty and student beliefs about teamwork and communication. Background: What Does “Effective” Mean? As suggested above, questions of effectiveness for both communication and teamwork have been explored extensively by scholars from fields such as composition, rhetoric, writing studies, organizational behavior, industrial psychology, and many others. Within the narrower field of engineering education, work such as that by House et al. 19 provide useful evaluation rubrics for communication, while tools such as the Comprehensive Assessment for Team-Member Effectiveness (CATME) 16 offer criteria (as well as a web-based tool) for evaluating students’ performance on teams. In both cases, however, these engineering-specific rubrics, are grounded in the broader literature surrounding communication and teamwork, respectively. As a result, in considering a meaningful framework for analyzing faculty beliefs and comparing them to the existing bodies of literature, we turned to a larger national effort focused on the development of assessment rubrics for a range of general education outcomes – the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ (AACU) Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) project 20 . Focused on outcomes generally associated with liberal education, the VALUE project brought together faculty from AACU member institutions to develop a common set of rubrics for outcomes ranging from civic engagement to integrative learning to reading, including rubrics for oral communication, written communication, and teamwork. Each rubric provides an overall definition for the learning outcome and any key terms, and identifies benchmark, milestone, and capstone performance standards for specific, measurable criteria. Tested across universities and disciplines 21, 22 , the rubrics provide a useful set of common criteria to begin exploring how the beliefs and expectations of engineering faculty align with larger discussions around communication and teamwork. Table 1 lists the criteria for written communication and teamwork used in this analysis, and provides the definition for “Capstone” achievement, which serves as the preliminary definitions for our analysis (coding). Table 1: Written Communication and Teamwork Skills Analysis Capstone Achievement

Match or Mismatch: Engineering Faculty Beliefs about Communication and Teamwork versus Published Criteria