Responsive Professional Education: Balancing Outcomes and Opportunities

Preparing the professoriate of the future: graduate student socialization for faculty roles

Background
ABET-accredited engineering programs must help students develop specific outcomes (i.e., competencies). Faculty must determine the relative emphasis among the competencies. Yet, information is sparse about the relative importance of each competency for professional practice.

Purpose (Hypothesis)
This study synthesizes opinions of engineering graduates about which competencies are important for professional practice.

Design/Method
A survey asked undergraduate alumni of a large public university in the Midwest to rate the importance of the ABET competencies in their professional experience. Responses included descriptions of education, post-graduate work environment, and demographics. Protected, post-hoc, all-pairwise multiple comparisons determined patterns in the importance ratings, for the aggregate, and for descriptive subgroups.

Results
The lowest-rated competency's mean rating was 3.3 out of 5. Graduates of 11 engineering majors rated a top cluster of competencies (teamwork, communication, data analysis, and problem solving) significantly higher than a bottom cluster (contemporary issues, design of experiments, and understanding the impact of one's work). Importance ratings of five other competencies fell in an intermediate cluster in which importance was statistically tied to either the top or bottom cluster, depending on work environment or academic discipline-not demographics. The clusters were stable over time, that is, over seven survey administrations (1999–2005), years since graduation (0, 2, 6 & 10), and graduation year (1989–2003).

Conclusions
Graduates across engineering disciplines share a pattern of importance for professional practice among the ABET competencies that is statistically significant, consistent across demographic variables, and stable over time. This pattern can inform faculty decisions about curriculum emphasis within and across engineering disciplines.

background

Which ABET Competencies Do Engineering Graduates Find Most Important in their Work

What Competencies Should Undergraduate Engineering Programs Emphasize? A Systematic Review

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Inexact Sciences: Professional Education and the Development of Expertise. Issue Paper 87-2.

Professionals contribute to society in a variety of ways They design buildings and bridges that will serve their clients' purposes, prescribe drugs or perform surgery designed to rectify their patients' physical ailments or to make them more comfortable, decide what content to teach students and how to teach it, and defend clients They share in common the ability to connect solutions to problems And they are assumed to possess special expertise that enables them to do this In this paper, I review literature on the nature of expertise and on how it is acquired To do justice to the issues, I include important nonempirical, as well as empirical, literature I also include empirical studies drawn from outside professional education literature, particularly from cognitive psychology I review four definitions of expertise, each of which incorporates a different view about how expertise influences professional actions: expertise as technical skill, as application of theory, as critical analysis, and as deliberate action Each succeeding definition remedies failures of earlier definitions, and in so doing each defines expertise as a more complicated phenomenon than its predecessor But in the end, each definition is incomplete in some critical way There is also a skeptical view of professional expertise, usually expressed outside professional education circles, which I allude to occasionally with the help of Moliere The view pervades sociological literature of professional education and pervades lay literature as well It is not a new view; it is expressed repeatedly in Moliere's plays For instance, in The Imaginary Invalid, the character Beralde suggests that his brother become a doctor When the brother protests that he is too ignorant, Beralde responds, "Once you put on the cap and gown of a doctor the rest comes of itself You'll find you have all the skill you require    Whatever nonsense you talk becomes wisdom and all that rubbish, good sense"

Responsive Professional Education: Balancing Outcomes and Opportunities

Citations

Preparing the professoriate of the future: graduate student socialization for faculty roles

Which ABET Competencies Do Engineering Graduates Find Most Important in their Work

What Competencies Should Undergraduate Engineering Programs Emphasize? A Systematic Review

Inexact Sciences: Professional Education and the Development of Expertise. Issue Paper 87-2.

Inexact Sciences: Professional Education and the Development of Expertise

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