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Abstract The paper aims to investigate to what degree curricular interventions impact students' global competency development. The interventions examined are those used by program directors to guide students enrolled in a five-year, dual-bachelor degree international engineering program before, during, and after studying and interning abroad. Currently, for ABET accreditation, every engineering program must demonstrate that its graduates possess “the ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences,” and “the ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental and societal contexts.” 1 According to ABET Executive Director Michael Milligan 2, communication skills, especially the ability to effectively communicate across cultures, are essential to achieve success in the modern workplace. Yet little has been done to define what educational measures are appropriate to accomplish this goal. It is also not clear to what extent global competency is the result of personal attributes, prior experiences, or curricular and extracurricular experiences. Building on previous work 3, 4, 5, 6 we will investigate in what way targeted interventions can impact intercultural competency development in engineering students who spent a year abroad studying & interning in Asia, Europe or Latin America using the language of the country in which they were immersed. The results of a longitudinal study IRB protocol 1819-164 looking at changes in students’ perceived and developmental orientations along the Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC) and measured by Mitchell Hammer’s internationally validated Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) instrument 7 will be reported. In addition to the quantitative data from the above study we will analyze qualitative student reflections from assignments given to them while enrolled in a six-credit course taught by their faculty directors during students’ six-month internship abroad. Those consist of written reports, journal entries and video assignments. Another set of qualitative data is derived from post study abroad focus group reflections. Both will be analyzed using standard content analysis procedures to triangulate the data.
Berka et al. (Tue,) studied this question.