Quantifying and Qualifying the Preparedness of Engineering Students Collaborating with Underserved Communities Internationally

Increasing globalization and technological innovations have redefined the role of engineers in working towards sustainable development. This is reflected in the creation and adoption of ABET Engineering Criteria 2000 which included six professional skills to prepare engineers who were more aware of how their profession, products and services are embedded in the larger global, socio-economic and political context. The question of how to measure and evaluate preparedness of engineering students to meet these requirements remains an open question. This paper proposes a performance indicator called global preparedness efficacy to measure the effectiveness of curricula that bring student engineers together with underserved communities as a means to satisfying ABET criteria 3h, which is “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context.” The paper describes a course curriculum that was developed to educate student engineers to work with rather than for underserved communities in rural India to design sanitation and hygiene solutions. What differentiates this course from other similar efforts is that the course curriculum requires students and community partners to articulate their personal connection to and care for the problem space, enabling a discourse that fosters collaboration as equals. In addition, the course curriculum provides a unique experience for student engineers to engage with community partners directly by using virtual communication technologies in order to incorporate the local historic, social, political and cultural context into their design solutions. 334 reflection journals collected from 16 students describing their engagement with the design process and collaboration with community partners (both virtually and in-person) are analyzed using a coding scheme to identify what curricular elements contribute to building global preparedness efficacy.