Measuring global awareness interest development of engineering and information technology students

Engineers and information technology professionals often work in international settings or teams, as well as across diverse cultures in today's global economy. Ever expanding globalized society has required updates in organizational procedures and practices, especially for engineering and information technology organizations, to keep up with increasingly competitive and technology-oriented markets. Professional accreditation organizations (e.g., ABET, Inc.) also recognized that it is necessary to develop programs to prepare globally competent graduates. In this paper, our primary emphasis is on understanding students' interest in global awareness. As the theoretical framework, we use Model of Domain Learning (MDL) - a learning theory that has a three-pronged approach to the conceptualization of learning in a domain, covering interest, knowledge and strategic processing. Students' interest in a domain changes from situational to individual as they develop from novice to proficient in the domain. Therefore, we propose interest as an additional construct to measure students' global awareness. We developed an instrument to effectively measure students' global awareness development and engagement throughout their education. In this paper, we present our preliminary findings for the proposed global awareness interest assessment framework and also analyze factors affecting engineering and technology students' global awareness interest.

I. Introduction and Background

Development of new communication technologies has been one of the major reasons to accelerate the globalization phenomenon. Multinational corporations can now have access to knowledge and human capital anywhere in the world in an efficient and direct fashion. This new global order requires educating engineering students with competencies to be competitive in the global market. The calls for change in engineering education to prepare engineers not only with technical knowledge but also with professional skills are coming from a multitude of sectors: government, industry and academia [1]. In 1996, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) approved the set of Engineering Criteria 2000 that includes “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental and societal contexts (criterion 3(h).” [2]