Contextual Research-Empirical--A Direct Method for Teaching and Measuring Engineering Professional Skills

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The investigators propose to create a method to teach and measure the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) professional skills in the form of an undergraduate group learning intervention called the curricular debrief (CD) method. No direct method for teaching and measuring the simultaneous presence of these skills, which are now generally recognized as the standard in the undergraduate engineering education field, has existed in the literature prior to the CD method This project will expand, empirically study, and refine the CD method and Engineering Professional Skills Rubric (EPS), which is the accompanying measurement instrument. The primary research goal is to determine the instructional and educational impacts of the integration of the CD method into freshman to senior level courses across the undergraduate curricula.. Ongoing research conducted at WSU to establish the initial reliability and validity of the CD method has shown its potential for significant nationwide impact. Yet, more research is needed to provide strong evidence that the CD method as a performance task and the EPS Rubric as a measurement instrument are reliable and valid. This study's primary research goal is to rigorously establish the reliability and validity of the CD method and the EPS Rubric. A descriptive collective case study methodology and a randomized design will be used. This methodology will allow the investigators to establish efficacy and validity while understanding the contexts in which parallel performance tasks are implemented in three distinct sites and four distinct course-type settings. The settings are WSU, the University of Idaho, and Norwich University in Vermont. This project will directly contribute to fundamental research in engineering education on a problem of national importance and interest---how the nation can prepare future engineers with the skills they need for work in a global context.