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Session 13a6
Engineering Communication and Performance Minor Elaine Seat, J. Roger Parsons, and William A. Poppen Engineering Fundamentals and Counseling, Rehabilitation, and Human Services University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, 37996 Abstract - A minor in Engineering Communication and Performance is being created at the University of Tennessee in conjunction with the engage Freshman Engineering Program. This minor provides engineering undergraduate students with a credential and with formal training in complementary performance skills necessary for success in today's workplace. This interdisciplinary program aims to improve the ability of engineering graduates to work on teams, to be effective communicators, to be socially adept, and to be prepared for leadership roles. Five courses compose the minor. Three of these courses are new and custom-prepared for engineering students, while the other two may be selected from a limited list of courses that provide in-depth training on supervision, cultural diversity, and interpersonal interaction. This multidisciplinary program takes a novel approach in the subject matter presentation and in the method of coaching students to use these skills. In the custom courses, students receive instruction and are placed in mini-practicums, and they finish with a full practicum in either a social service or technical setting. This paper discusses assessment, course development, program basis and development, strategies for implementation of this new program, integration between engineering and counseling psychology, and student, faculty, and industry response to the program. The collaboration between disciplines makes this program transportable to other institutions as it is discipline dependent rather than dependent on individual specialty. Our experience with establishing this collaboration will also be discussed.
Introduction It is no secret that the quality of interpersonal, communication, and teaming skills in engineering – termed performance skills - is of concern to both industry employers and engineering educators. These skills include communication abilities, interpersonal interaction, conflict mediation, team performance, understanding of technical culture, and sensitivity toward diverse populations due to race, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic standing. To address the need for improved performance skills, a minor in Engineering Communication and Performance is being established at the University of Tennessee (UTK) College of Engineering, in conjunction with the College of Education’s Counseling, Rehabilitation, and Human Service Department and the engage Freshman Engineering Program. This new program uses both existing and new courses to
teach the complementary performance skills that enable engineers to optimize application of their technical skills. A formal minor provides the engineering graduate with a marketable credential and establishes a structure and format for teaching these non-technical and social skills in a problem solving context. Two courses have been piloted to evaluate effectiveness of instruction, determine assessment techniques, and gauge student and industry interest. A third course that serves as the minor’s capstone project will be piloted in Spring 2000. This paper discusses the minor’s instructional scope, use of interdisciplinary teams, and implementation strategies. In order to understand how a program to train engineers in performance competencies operates, it is necessary to determine the traits of a successful engineering student and their level of performance skills. After establishing this typical profile, the Engineering Communication and Performance Minor and the rationale for its design will be discussed.
Background The need to provide more than just technical skills to students in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SME&T) has been outlined by both the educational and industrial community. In the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) report Shaping the Future [1], education is said to be more than an acquisition of facts. Science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SME&T) education has been encouraged to become more holistic through engaging the student in the larger campus setting and creating a sense of professionalism [2]. Performance skills are being discussed with respect to personality type, learning styles, improved learning in groups, socialization for working with others, and interpersonal skills. In the December 1998 issue of the American Society for Engineering Education’s (ASEE) magazine, PRISM, society president Ernest Smerdon writes about how not just domestic educators, but the entire international engineering education community is faced with the challenge of teaching performance-type skills: From Utah to the Ukraine and from Milwaukee to Manila, industry is demanding that our graduates have better teamwork skills, communication abilities, and an understanding of the socio-economic context in which engineering is practiced. [3] Recent industry surveys highlight the need for engineering graduates to have more than just technical
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Session 13a6 competency. The Society of Manufacturing Engineers conducted an industry survey [4], the Manufacturing Education Plan (MEP), to guide their future educational emphasis. This effort focused on identifying competency gaps in engineering skills. Of the 14 identified competency gaps, seven were associated with performance skills. Similarly, the results of a formal survey of 15 aerospace and defense companies that identified industry expectations of new graduates with respect to ABET Criteria 2000 suggests that graduates are expected to have performed and demonstrated ability in a team-based experience [5]. Today’s engineering graduates are not lacking in technical competency or in their understanding of science, math, and physics. These graduates lack competency in the performance skills that enable them to use their technical skills. These skills allow them to use their technical abilities as a part of a team, to understand conflict as a means for discussion instead of an angry confrontation, and to respect difference as a creative opportunity rather than an obstacle. To achieve success, today’s engineers must be team members who thrive while working with a variety of people having differing social, educational, and technical skills. There is a need emerging for the science-trained professional who has more skills than offered by a single discipline. However, the skills being integrated are often either two sciences, such as biochemistry, or science and business, such as special MBA programs for persons having mathematics, engineering, or science degrees.[6] These programs continue to further expand knowledge for problem solving rather than provide the complementary skills needed to use problem solving ability.
Profile of the Typical Engineering Student
world. This mismatch often results in their withdrawal and isolation from other people, particularly when situations become unstructured and unpredictable, as in the case of perceived disagreement or conflict. [11] Positive Reinforcement. The majority of students entering engineering schools have excelled in the traditional secondary school curriculum, especially in the areas of mathematics and science. They have been rewarded for being competitive, getting the right answer, and getting higher grade scores than most of their classmates. Cara Garcia [12] suggests students who have done well in the traditional system have learned to: • perform individually for grades by the teacher, • individually take tests (overcome test anxiety), and • individually deliver oral reports. In programs where teaming performance becomes part of the evaluation process, the student must master an entirely difference set of abilities that demonstrate knowledge by: • being a team member and cooperating in a group, • helping to plan, • pacing and scheduling projects, • getting peer and teacher feedback on work, and • teaching classmates. In traditional education, the individual has control of performance and outcomes. However, in team and group work, the individual loses control in favor of the group. The shift from the traditional system of education to one of groups and student participation redefines what a good student does and can threaten and raise the anxiety of the traditionally good student. Engineering students and graduate engineers have years of positive reinforcement based on individual competitiveness and control of outcomes. As a whole, the components of successful teams and group work have not been rewarded. Engineers and engineering students perform high quality work, but without a clear explanation of the redefinition of a what a good student or engineer does, they will continue to perform to the traditional criteria. The profile of the typical engineering student, and eventually the graduate engineer is a person who: • excels at learning structures that explain systems and dis-embedding complex systems into pieces for reassembly into a different structure (problem solving); • dislikes unpredictable situations because of a lack of structure and rules to guide response; and • has been rewarded for being competitive at an individual level in task performance. Certainly, problem solving ability is a strength that should be encouraged. However, accompanying attitudes often expressed by problem solvers toward the dynamic, unpredictable nature of interpersonal interactions do not lead to the successful use of problem solving skills. The highly competitive nature of most problem solvers also hinders teamwork ability.
Engineers, as a group, are often known for their ability to solve problems and their inability to work well with other people. This stereotype is most likely deserved based on the typical cognitive style of engineers [7] and its associated characteristics. [8] A successful program to counter their weakness in performance skills must be based on understanding their cognitive style and then using their strengths to improve these areas. Cognitive Style. The nature of SME&T education plays to the typical engineering graduate’s cognitive style, while disciplines such as the social sciences, do not. For instance, when teaching performance skills to engineering students, they complained about using role play activities and the fact that the training was not written down for them to read [9, 10]. Representative of the cognitive style of problem solvers, they preferred problems that were structured and predictable. However, role playing activities with unpredictable responses are neither structured nor predictable. The same is true in dealing with people; there are no theories or proofs. Working with people creates a dynamic situation where responses cannot be exactly planned or outcomes predicted. Interacting with people often does not fit the problem solver’s way of seeing the 0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico 29th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 13a6-23
Session 13a6 Teaching Performance Skills Performance skill instruction has its origins in the disciplines of education, counseling, and psychology under the influence of people who have a natural tendency to excel at personal interactions. Just as those who naturally excel at mathematics and science migrate toward the physical sciences, the social sciences attract people who have a natural ability in those disciplines. Thus, performance skills training is usually developed from the perspective of people who have an innate ability for personal interaction. Their sense of how to teach interpersonal skills matches the learning style of students in the social sciences, but does not always match the way that physical science problem solvers understand and learn new skills. For the past four years, specialists having backgrounds in performance psychology, counseling psychology, engineering, and engineering education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have been developing custom performance skills training and interventions for engineering students using a combination of principles from cognitive and perceptual style theory, human motor behavior, and group dynamics. The same skills are taught that communication skill specialists use, but these skills are presented in the format and terms that problem solvers understand. Building on the knowledge that problem solvers excel at dis-embedding scenarios and then executing the pieces against a predefined structure, our training has been designed to provide a simple structure of rules for a particular performance skill. For instance, students are taught to interview for information, an important engineering skill, using lists of “do’s and don’ts” [9]. Teaching rules-based communication skills with structure translates a seemingly unpredictable situation into one where engineers can excel. Teaching methods have also been restructured based on the tendencies of problem solvers as predicted by performance psychology and human motor behavior. Problem solvers possess the natural tendency to take in
information and then assemble it for themselves into a useful structure. Thus, our training purposely requires students to role play and interact in closely supervised groups where each person spends time observing and a facilitator provides personal feedback to the performer [13], to offset the natural tendency to solve problems independently. This system of teaching communications skills prevents the learner from assembling the information in their own “convenient” fashion. Instead it provides a closely coached practice opportunity of demonstration and observation of each group member’s mistakes and suggested corrections. This pilot work in developing performance skills for problem solvers forms the basis for the design of a proposed program to target the issue of teaching engineers the performance skills needed to successfully use their technical skills in the workplace. Working with people is a learned skill. This program teaches skills directly – not by hoping that performance skills are learned from simply working in groups, but by creating curriculum and programs that focus on performance skills taught in a voice that problem solvers can understand.
The Engineering Communication and Performance Minor A minor is being created for undergraduate engineering students in Engineering Communication and Performance. This minor teaches technical performers, or problem solvers, the skills necessary for working in teams, facilitating others, understanding individual differences, and improving personal performance. This minor crosses several disciplines and addresses how people really work, interact, and perform, along with teaching the social, cultural, and expression components of interacting and perceiving. It requires an additional semester's work of 15 hours (of which 6 hours may also count toward the engineering degree) and provides the student with a certified credential. The minor is composed of five courses as outlined in Table 1. Two of the courses count toward the general humanities requirement of the engineering degree and can be
Table 1: Course requirements for the Engineering Communication and Performance Minor Course CECP 206 - Facilitation of Technical Teams (CECP - Counselor Education & Counseling Psychology) CECP 306 - Facilitation of Technical Performance CECP 406 - Capstone Practicum Two Courses selected from the following: Psych 360 - Social Psychology Psych/Mgmt 440 - Organizational Psychology HRD 417 - Principles of Supervision Speech Comm 420 - Communication & Conflict Speech Comm 440 - Organizational Communication
Description Facilitation and group dynamics of technical task teams with mini-practicum Facilitation of individuals for performance improvement of both technical and communication skills with mini-practicum Supervised social service or technical discipline practicum Theoretical basis for performance skills, cultural perspective, and leadership
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Session 13a6 selected from a set of five. The other three courses have been specifically created for this minor. The three specially developed courses (CECP 206, 306, and 406) teach performance skills in the engineering learning style. Two of the courses (CECP 206-306) are companions and have an instructional component, a minipracticum, and a supervision period so that the students can practice the skills they are learning and then receive feedback on their performance. The final course serves as a capstone project where the students serve a full practicum with supervision. The format for the two companion courses is to meet for four hours per week, with one hour of instruction, one hour of group supervision (students are split into groups of five), and two hours of working with freshman teams. Each person is assigned two freshman teams to facilitate for the semester, and this individual meets with each team for one hour every week. The supervision hour is directed by counseling psychology doctoral students enrolled in a required doctoral level supervision class. The classes use freshman teams as subjects in the mini-practicum. Working with the freshman program not only allows the students a forum that they are familiar with, but also provides the freshman with an upper-class engineering student mentor. The first of the companion courses (CECP 206) has been developed during the past two years and covers the topic of Facilitation of Technical Teams. A sample of the syllabus for this course is provided in Appendix A. The second class was piloted in the Spring 1999 semester and covered the topic of Facilitation of Individual Performance. The Capstone Practicum (CECP 406) will be initially taught in the Spring of 2000. It is designed to broaden the student's vision of using their performance skills by having them work with projects outside of the College of Engineering. In this capstone project, students will be paired with senior students majoring in Human Services that are in a six hour capstone project. One of the goals of this minor is to teach students that they have skills and talents that can serve beyond their engineering jobs. By placing them in a human services role with faculty support, the minor facilitates this purpose.
Assessment Assessment of results is an important part of the program because it is only through accurate assessment that the effectiveness of the teaching style and improvement in student abilities can be evaluated. Assessment has been a part of this program beginning with the first pilot facilitation courses in 1995. [10] Experience with assessment has developed an understanding of the problems in accurately measuring personal change and group dynamics. The assessment program has been modified each year to improve instruments, techniques, and areas of assessment. Assessment techniques have included both qualitative and quantitative measures. [14, 15]
Assessment is used to measure change in student performance skills, change in the team experience for those teams facilitated, and change in the team experience for those with formal performance skills training. To date, these constructs have been primarily measured using pre- and post-testing of students during a semester. Several lessons have been learned about testing team and individual performance. • Timing is critical in data gathering. The student's perception of their experience can vary drastically from the week before a milestone or project deadline to several days afterward. As deadlines approach, students resent interruptions and their team's stress level increases, providing a different view of team health from just after the deadline. • From the program’s initiation, pre- and post-testing has been performed with pre-testing at the first of the semester and post-testing near the end. The pretest date is unrealistic because students are unsure of the project, may not know their team members, and have not yet performed as a team. Post-testing results are particularly susceptible to end of the semester timing influences. • Pre- and post-testing for behavioral changes due to the Team Facilitation Class are not valid indicators of behavioral changes. Surveys given in this short time span measure changes in a cognitive response to a behavior, not a change in behavior. As a result of these two lessons, we are beginning to use our data in different ways. We now use surveys of the team experience, not as measures of change, but as immediate indicators of what is going on in the team. This data from consecutive years allows comparison of known team measures to plan interventions and to evaluate facilitation effectiveness in supervision sessions. A new longitudinal study has begun that will measure behavioral changes resulting from the performance skills training. This study will be started throughout the College of Engineering and will track student’s team performance throughout their academic career. The study design will use a peer evaluation survey in every course that uses teams. The survey will be given a single time, at mid-semester and not near a deadline, to minimize timing influences. This evaluation will not influence the student’s grade. It is anticipated that students in the minor will receive better peer evaluations than those without the performance skills training, and overall scores of teams having members with the training will improve.
Creating the Program New programs often meet a unique set of obstacles. This program faces difficulty in acceptance because it is an undergraduate program, is taught as a service for students in a different college, and asks educators to prepare students for careers unlike their own and outside of research.[16]
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Session 13a6 The program’s use of interdisciplinary methods is innovative. The interdisciplinary connection goes beyond just having another discipline teach a course. The program and course content have been specifically integrated with the engage Freshman engineering teams. Presentation of the content has been reworked to be compatible with the problem solver’s style, and the manner of supervision is pushes the students to behave differently than their natural tendencies. This program is transportable to other institutions because it is dependent on skills that reside within most schools rather than the expertise of individuals. Setting up a similar program requires creating the interdisciplinary link with a counseling or psychology program, integrating into courses having a team component to have teams for students to facilitate, and using rules-based performance training to accommodate the problem solver’s style. Student Interest Student interest in this minor and the facilitation courses has been high. Twenty-five percent of the entering freshmen class enrolled in the first facilitation course, with 20% continuing toward completion of the minor. At UTK, these numbers create two sections of the first two classes, CECP 206 and CECP 306. Classroom activities often use role playing and experiential exercises, limiting class size to 20 students or less. Many students are only interested in taking one facilitation course. It is anticipated that 30 students per year will complete the minor. The number of undergraduate and graduate students involved in the total minor program has created the need for one full time faculty member and two half time graduate assistants. Credentials The credential of a minor produces a recognized university program. If this program were simply a few isolated courses, students would not learn marketable skills, and the university would have little impetus to teach courses that are not required by any program. The creation of the recognized minor credential generates program support and student and industry interest. The College of Engineering is actively educating its industrial partners about this new minor. Several key industrial partners have been consulted about the course content to get their feedback regarding the scope of the program and also to develop a market for students with the credential. A one page insert that describes the minor is available for students to include with resumes. Teaching engineering students to learn about working with others and on teams with the interaction being evaluated instead of the technical outcome is an innovation in engineering education. This emphasis on interaction rather than technical performance gives the student an appreciation for skills associated with successfully working with others. The profile of the successful student is
redefined in this series of courses to broaden their perspective. Analysis of data from the pilot courses suggests that this curriculum design is working both in the team experience and in behavior modification. The minor as a marketable credential is evidenced by the student response to the initial course offering and subsequent interest in pursuing this field to depth offered by the minor. Making the Interdisciplinary Link Teaching the same material in a different way to a new audience can create several obstacles. First, this is an undergraduate program. Currently, there is not an emphasis or reward for creating new undergraduate programs. Also, this program typically does not fit in cleanly with existing research programs in the social sciences. These students most likely will not follow in their counseling professor’s footsteps and are not potential doctoral candidates in the field of their minor. However, counseling and psychology programs have incentive to sponsor this minor. This program is anticipated to result in an additional 400 student credit hours in new courses. The graduate courses that support the minor and team efforts have the potential to create an emphasis in counseling psychology toward task groups, a recognized subset of the American Society of Group Work. With experience in industry-type settings, counseling graduates have a broader job market with training in using their skills in both industrial and social settings. Funding for doctoral students is limited in the social sciences. This minor funds two Ph.D. counseling graduate students and has resulted in a new research area in counseling as facilitation of technical task groups. Implementation Issues There are a variety of implementation issues associated with this program ranging from the creation of a new program and courses to the lack of an adequate text. Most of the issues are independent, but all result from the typical problems associated with first time innovation and implementation. Creation of three new courses and a new program is problematic at a time when many schools are cutting back. It is important to use industry’s insistence that graduates be able to work in teams to set the stage for acceptance. Teaching this topic with the rules-based approach is also new. The course teaches communication skills, project management skills, and team problem solving skills. Currently, there is no text that covers this range of topics. Not only is it difficult for instructors to cover the course content without a text, it is imperative that engineering students have a text along with the experiential classroom exercises and facilitation supervision to accommodate their perceptual style. The problem solver’s style depends on reading and assembling information internally to be able to use it effectively.
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Session 13a6 This program depends on the team facilitation and supervision. Thus, without teams such as those in UTK’s freshman program, another source of teams must be found. We believe it is important for the student facilitators to work with a team in a course they have already taken. Facilitators believe in their value when they work with students who are currently doing what they did just a year before. This program benefits from leadership by persons having both a technical and counseling background. This position is not one that usually exists and does not fit the standard teaching and research roles in either of the two disciplines. Finding the leadership for this program is perhaps the biggest obstacle due to traditional roles within the University. The Future: Expanding To Other Teams The Engineering Communication and Performance minor is receiving widespread acceptance from students, faculty, and industry. Students find that these courses create interest from potential employers, and industry contacts inquire as to those students with formal training. Students who have facilitated freshman teams are also anxious to continue practicing their facilitation skills with other groups and are placed with other teams. However, the response from faculty in upper division classes has been the most exciting. The idea of using facilitators to monitor team interaction and improve performance has been embraced, and we are currently developing programs where facilitators are used throughout the undergraduate program whenever teams are utilized. Working with other people is a learned skill. This program teaches these skills, and it teaches them in the style of the engineering student. Just as a summer internship or co-op experience provides hands-on experience, the team facilitation and supervision component, along with the capstone project, helps students transfer their classroom learning to everyday skills. This program fills in the gaps that allow engineering students to use their technical degrees to their highest possible potential.
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4) Society of Manufacturing Engineers (1998) Manufacturing Education Plan (MEP). Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Dearborn, MI. 5) Lang, James D., Cruse, Susan, McVey, Francis D., and McMasters, John (1999). Industry expectations of new engineers: A survey to assist curriculum designers. Journal of Engineering Education, 88(1), 43-51. 6) Tobias, Sheila and Birrer, Frans (1998). The sciencetrained professional. Industry & Higher Education. August, 1998. 7) Barrett, Gerald V. & Thornton, Carl L. (1967). Cognitive style differences between engineers and college students. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 25, 789793. 8) Witkin, Herman A. & Goodenough, Donald R. (1977). Field dependence and interpersonal behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 84(4), 661-689. 9) Seat, Elaine & Lord, Susan M. (1998). Enabling effective engineering teams: A program for teaching interaction skills. Journal of Engineering Education (in press). 10) Seat, J. Elaine, Poppen, William A., Boone, Kathy, & Parsons, J. Roger (1996). Making design teams work. In M. Iskander (Ed.), Frontiers in education conference: Technology-based re-engineering engineering education. Salt Lake City, UT. November, 1996. 11) Witkin, Herman A., & Goodenough, Donald R. (1981). Cognitive styles, essence and origins. New York: International Universities Press, 23-64. 12) Garcia, Cara L. (1998). Too scared to learn: Overcoming academic anxiety. Thousand Oaks, CA. Corwin Press, Inc. 13) McCullagh, P. & Caird, J. K. (1990). Correct and learning models and the use of model knowledge of results in the acquisition and retention of a motor skill. Journal of Human Movement Studies, 18. 107-116. 14) Knight, D., Poppen, W., Seat, E., Parsons, J., Klukken, G., & Glore, A. (1998) Training engineering upperclassmen to facilitate freshman design teams. In American Society of Engineering Education conference proceedings: Engineering education: Contributing to U.S. competitiveness. Seattle, WA, June, 1998. 15) Knight, D, Poppen, W., Klukken, G., Parsons, J., & Seat, E. (1998). Coaching engineering design teams. In American Society of Engineering Education conference proceedings: Engineering education: Contributing to U.S. competitiveness. Seattle, WA, June, 1998. 16) Tobias, Sheila, and Chubin, Daryl E. (1996). New Degrees for Today’s Scientists. Chronicle of Higher Education. July 12, 1996.
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