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International experiences are viewed as important components of undergraduate engineering education. Yet little has been done to define global preparedness, specify alternatives for achieving it, or determine to what degree being globally prepared is the result of personal attributes, prior experiences (including pre-college), or specific educational experiences. A collaboration of investigators from four universities are investigating how the broad spectrum of international experiences both in and outside of formal curricula impact engineering students' global preparedness. Now in its fifth year of research, we have conducted three primary studies to learn more about global preparedness. The first was an extensive Delphi survey with subject matter experts. The second consisted of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of students at our four partner institutions. The third is a much larger survey of engineering students at 13 representative engineering programs across the U.S. This paper focuses on the results of the third study. At each campus we have obtained stratified random samples of freshmen and seniors; in the case of seniors we have subdivided the sample into two cohorts - those who had an international experience while an undergraduate student and those who had not participated in an international activity. All students completed a carefully tested instrument that captured their demographics, experiences and a measure of their global preparedness. To determine the latter, we utilized the nationally normed Global Perspective Inventory developed by Braskamp and colleagues. This has enabled us to identify changes in global awareness, knowledge and thinking over the course of the students' transition from incoming freshman to graduating senior. We report what we have learned from this extensive sample of over 2,500 students. The results of this third study and the two earlier linked studies have resulted in guidelines for engineering administrators and faculty interested in preparing students for the global economy. Similar to our earlier papers, we provide an overview of the updated results of this NSF funded research initiative that has investigated how the various internationally focused learning experiences within engineering (both curricular and cocurricular) impact students' global preparedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capstone design courses are intended to provide a culminating experience for senior undergraduate engineering majors. Universities vary in how they implement the instruction and implementation of the design process in their capstone courses. For example, many have a separate class in design methods, followed by a one-semester capstone course where teams work on a "design, build, test" project. Other institutions teach design methodology incorporated into the capstone design project in what is often a two-semester capstone sequence. In the cases where design methodology is incorporated into a two-semester capstone course, it is possible that this is the students' first extensive exposure to design methods and process. In that case, students may be experiencing methods such as "Customer Needs Analysis", "Functional Decomposition", "Concept Generation", "Concept Selection" and "Prototype Planning" for the first time. From a constructivist educational standpoint, it can be problematic for students to apply these design techniques for the first time on what is often a complex, real world capstone design problem. One solution to this problem is to incorporate a short design experience at the beginning of the two-semester capstone course. This can allow the students an initial experience with the design methods that can provide a "learning scaffold" for their implementation of the full suite of design methods over the course of a two-semester project. For the last three years, we have implemented three versions of a short, introductory design project (i.e. designette) in our two-semester capstone design sequence. In our uses of the designette project, the suite of five core design methods mentioned above were taught in an abbreviated form. However, in one year the designette lasted ten class hours, the next year's designette lasted 14 class hours, and this past year's project lasted seven class hours. The longest designette allowed for greater depth in the initial coverage of the methods and also provided greater time for prototyping and testing. Of course this was at the cost of consuming a greater percentage of the overall time allocated for the actual capstone design project. This paper reports on the implementation details of the designette projects, focusing in particular on advantages and disadvantages of the different implementations in the most recent years. Faculty and student feedback indicated that the use of the designette does increase student familiarity with the design methods. However, more subtle questions such as the number of lessons allocated for the designette and the depth of coverage of the design methods have much more complicated assessment results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tradeoff studies used in engineering choices are organized in a branching tree conceptual structure that curiously matches the conceptual schema employed by the law to find the best alternative in the natural world of human occurrences. Just as tradeoff study trees differentiate a level of attributes and a level of measures, common law legal practice has institutionalized the separation of the law and facts, which are separate determined by a trier-of-law and the trier-of- fact. Recognition of this similarity leads to the investigation of how the knowledge employed in each method can inform the other, both having evolved in rather insular research and practice fields. Broadly speaking, technical tradeoff studies can lend precision to this hybridization, while legal processes utilized in the jury trial system can provide wisdom as to the management of human perceptions and biases. This cross-disciplinary comparison helps engineering acknowledge and engage these human biases with a formulation and analysis of the components and workings of the law. While both decision processes span the breach between complementary qualitative and quantitative regions, they employ vastly different apparati that are best studied together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in learning science has focused on students' misconceptions about emergence. In emergent phenomena, the interactions of the agents in the phenomenon aggregate and form a self-organizing pattern that can be seen at a higher level. One such emergent system, drift, is a fundamental mechanism for semiconductors. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the presence and prevalence of misconceptions about emergence students have about drift, and to determine what relationships existed between the identified misconceptions. Forty-one undergraduate engineering students participated in the written protocol study. Participants' responses were coded and analyzed using written protocol analysis. A total of 10 emergent misconceptions were observed for drift. Sixty-three percent of participant responses exhibited an emergent misconception, with participants typically anthropomorphizing the electrons' actions in the phenomenon. Quantitative analyses were completed utilizing non-parametric Kendall's taub correlation demonstrated significant relationships between the goal-directed nature of the phenomenon and electron volition (0.45, <0.05), the predictability and causal reasons for the phenomenon's pattern (0.31, <0.05), and the not random predictable aspects of the phenomenon (0.31, p<0.05). Results indicated that undergraduate engineering students hold misconceptions related to emergence regarding drift and that these misconceptions are prevalent. Furthermore, the relationships observed indicated that learners may view emergence in particular ways -- offering insight into how educators can better prepare and develop learning material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]