Role of Relevance in Professional Skills Application in Undergraduate Multi-Disciplinary Teams

Abstract The updated accreditation criteria set by ABET includes student learning outcomes that put emphasis on development of professional skills for nurturing practicing engineers in today's society. Studies suggest that there exists a gap between recent graduates and industry expectations on this front. Many efforts and strategies are being deployed by universities to help address this gap including industry collaboration, personalized curriculums and experiential learning. One such example of efforts is the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program at Purdue University, which provides opportunities for undergraduate students to earn academic credit by participating in real-world research and design projects aligned with active research areas of Purdue faculty members and national, international, and industry-sponsored design challenges. Because the projects and teams within these programs span a wide-variety of contexts and require very diverse knowledge and skill development, the project work is supplemented with Professional Development (PD) workshops. The PD workshops are short modules ranging over a variety of professional topics that complement traditional curriculum and are intended to provide opportunities for students to learn skills needed for their projects and their overall professional goals. As part of program evaluation, we seek to study in what ways students participating in these workshops are connecting the skills and concepts taught in these workshops to their academic, professional or personal goals, more broadly, and their projects, more specifically. In addition, this study explores the factors affecting this process. To aid this evaluation, we use data collected from PD workshops, in the form of pre- and post-workshop surveys. This study explores the relation between their self reported intention and confidence to apply these skills and post workshop outcomes and pre workshop conditions. Post workshop outcomes include factors such as change in perception of relevance, role of the workshop, identification of areas of application and valuable lessons, while pre-existing conditions include factors such as self reported physiological and psychological state of the students. This paper presents statistical analyses of paired data, collected over 89 unique participants across 9 different topic workshops and the insights that we gained along the aforementioned directions from the pre and post-workshop conditions and outcomes. We see that overall students do want to make connections in what they learn and their other goals. They are successful in identifying applications in many aspects of their lives including professional, research, academic and personal goals. Our analysis found that there is a significant role of the type of the workshop and workshop's ability in teaching and making the topic relevant. In addition, we found the process is also impacted by a student's prior importance and relevance of the topic and their ability to identify valuable concepts at varying depths.