Toward Interdisciplinary Teamwork in Japan: Developing Team-based Learning Experience and Its Assessment

Over the last ten years, the Japan Accreditation Board for Engineering Education (JABEE) has increasingly emphasized the importance of multidisciplinary teamwork abilities. Despite heavy investment to improve mechanical engineering education in Japan, the effectiveness of the education has not been sufficiently discussed. Traditionally, students are assessed on their in-depth understanding of specialized knowledge. With the surge of project-based learning, evaluation is largely focused on students’ final product or research results. We take a different stance and join the emerging call to foster engineering students’ abilities of knowledge acquisition, communication, teamwork, and creativity. To evaluate these abilities, we have combined cultural perspectives with a student-centered approach to inquire what constitutes engineering and its practice in Japan. We discuss the challenges and propose qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate student learning in Japanese engineering design education. Introduction Who is an engineer? Today and future The engineering educational situation in Japan is quite unique. Japan has a disproportionately large post graduate student body pursuing natural science and engineering as compared to social sciences and humanities. This is uncommon in other countries, such as US, Germany, France, UK, and South Korea [1]. In addition to an extremely large number of other technical workers, Japan has an estimated 400,000 engineering researchers leading the field through technology development as shown in Fig.1. This number is close to the total number of doctors and dentists in Japan. Ohashi gives an estimate of technical personnel composition in Japan [2]. While engineering is popular in school, it is intriguing that students do not associate engineers with real images, according to a study, “Who is an engineer?” conducted with 1048 junior high and high school students in Japan [3]. We recently replicated this study and found that half of the freshmen in the mechanical engineering department at Kogakuin University could not answer the question, “What is an engineer?.” The elusiveness of the term “engineer” is undoubtedly a cultural product of Japanese upbringing and K12 education. This is certainly concerning, because if future engineers cannot identify with the concept of engineering, they might not understand their role, not just as a technical persons, but also as key collaborators for solving complex, interconnected societal problems in the world. Japanese engineering education has a huge responsibility for this, and it can play a pivotal role to improve the situation. Fig.1 : Quantitative components of science and technology personnel in Japan (Source:[2]) The question, “What constitutes engineering?”, is more difficult to answer today than it was fifty years ago. Japanese engineering societies have called for educational transformations to respond to the changing society within the country and in the world. In the chairman’s greetings of the Journals of Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Japan Society for Precision Engineering[4, 5], the necessity of workforce training in the engineering field and its adaptation to meet the changes brought about by AI and globalization, has been emphasized. In November 2018, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology announced the "Grand Design for Higher Education for 2040 (report)," and in June 2019, the Government Council for the Promotion of Integrated Innovation [6] stated the importance of rebuilding engineering education, regardless of the existing frameworks, for universities to respond to the challenges raised in the Sustainable Development Goals and to support the AI based society. New education models have been proposed for human resources development in response to changes in the structure of science and technology (for example, the fourth Council for the Promotion of Human Resources Development for Industrial Revolution in Japan [7]). Despite these initiatives, we feel that the value of engineering education and engineering education research are not sufficiently recognized in Japanese academia. Obstacles of interdisciplinary teamwork in Japanese engineering education As the Japanese economy is slowing down and there is a decline in the working-age population, academic and industrial entities have been actively looking for ways to revitalize the economy. For instance, a large number of Japanese educators and corporations have visited Silicon Valley, which has played a key role in many of the transformations that have been attempted by Japanese organizations in recent years [8]. Design thinking has been included in the curriculum for engineering schools at top universities in Japan, such as the University of Tokyo and the Kyoto Institute of Technology. Also, problem-based learning (PBL) [9, 10] and active independent learning have been actively adopted in the country [6]. An example is the industry-academia collaborative implementation of PBL [11] as exemplified by ME 310 at Stanford University. A central theme across these hands-on experiential learning models is teamwork. Multidisciplinary teamwork forms the base of innovation as innovation requires collaboration between innovators with highly 870,000 Scientists 3 million Engineers 370,000 Licensed Architect (1st grade) 400,000 engineering researcher 110,000 professional engineers 100,000 new bachelor / year specialized expertise from a heterogeneous background. The introduction of interdisciplinary teamwork education in Japanese engineering education has been discussed and implemented for about ten years to comply with the global engineering education standards, as stated by ABET and others. The JABEE has proposed that students should foster the ability of being team members as well as the abilities of a leader. It is suggested that, “Japanese engineering students should acquire the ability to interact with people of diverse cultures, values, and interests, and to collaborate with people from a wide range of specialties, which is necessary when working in a globalized world” [12]. JABEE has also proposed rubrics to evaluate teamwork abilities1. However, when it comes to teaching and learning teamwork, especially for innovative problem-solving projects that have high degrees of uncertainty, we lack the essential understanding of what good teamwork is and how to foster it in a group of students. In addition, the assessment of teamwork ability is much lower in priority than the traditional focus on fostering deep domain knowledge. For instance, at this point, master’s education is still heavily anchored on the evaluation of research results and in-depth understanding of specialized knowledge, rather than problem-solving and interpersonal skills [6]. Student diversity in Japanese universities, especially in engineering universities is extremely low and this makes multidisciplinary teamwork education harder. Also, there is lot of gender disparity in these schools [13]. In an interdisciplinary design innovation workshop we conducted in 2018 at Kogakuin University, because of the lack of disciplinary diversity in the engineering student body, students of business and art and design background from other universities, some of whom travelled from other cities, had to be drawn in. In addition, all the engineer participants were males. At leading research universities, such as the University of Tokyo, there is very little diversity in various areas, as a large percentage of students advance from the same high school. In addition, many engineering faculty in Japan do not recognize the importance of student diversity in their classrooms, and that this diversity is the basic element to learning teamwork. In traditional Japanese educational curriculum, engineering educators themselves do not collaborate across disciplines or departments. The lack of gender and background diversity in engineering faculty is also another limitation. The lack of recognition of the problems and the under-examined social realities of engineering classrooms in Japan are all practical obstacles for teamwork education. Cultural considerations of interdisciplinary teamwork and its evaluation for Japanese engineering education When it comes to PBL outcome evaluation, a team of students may get very different grades in the US as compared to Japan. Unlike assessing fundamental science knowledge, the evaluation of interpersonal abilities is highly subjective, and thus culturally dependent. A common view is that Japanese prioritize quality over novelty, and conversely, Americans celebrate novel ideas more than quality. As increasing cross-cultural research is conducted on cultural psychology and engineering education, it has been observed that while Americans desire high-arousal emotions, the ideal emotion for the Japanese is regulated calmness [14]. This implies that in the US, to impress the instructors during the final presentations, student groups are advised to show excitement and to smile. On the other hand, this would certainly confuse the teachers in Japan. Similarly, in terms of creativity in the US, emphasis is laid on empowerment and positive energy, as seen in design thinking educational programs. However, in Japan, creativity is based on reprimand and high pressure. As delineated in [15], an executive in charge of development at Honda remarked, “It is like putting team members on the second floor, removing the ladder, and telling them to jump or else. I believe creativity is born by pushing people against the wall and pressuring them almost to the extreme.” Forrester also found self-censorship plays an important role in Japanese innovation teams [16]. Although the necessity of learning to work in a team in higher education is profoundly stated (such as in [7]), in many cases the methodology to teach is a copy of the successful educational model of the US, without much delib