Global perspectives are key to engineering students’ success, but as educators we still need work on our strategy to integrate global experiences and thinking in our curricula.
Investigative Approaches for Rethinking the Design of Global Engineering Programming
Presented by Scott Streiner, University of Pittsburgh
Thursday, February 2, 2017
9:30 a.m.
Santa Catalina Hall (SANCA) 155, Polytechnic campus [map]
This free seminar is also available via Adobe Connect.
Abstract
Engineering global competency is an important educational outcome, with educators believing that success in a global context requires students to acquire specialized knowledge and further augment their skills and attitudes. Although global perspectives and experiences may be achieved through a wide variety of programs (both curricular and co-curricular), engineering programs have been slow to integrate into a cohesive strategy, and consequently are often operating with limited knowledge regarding the effectiveness of their programs. In fact, many engineering schools do not have an articulated, global programming strategy.
As higher education institutions begin to quantify their strategies for achieving global competency and invest in internationalizing their engineering programs, research is needed regarding: (1) Key global engineering education target areas and their relationship to sustained global programming efforts; (2) programming directions that can be used by universities in general and engineering schools in particular; and (3) how effective programming contributes to students’ global competency development.
Three separate studies (each in different stages) framed in different analytical lenses are presented in this seminar. The first study uses a participatory, mixed-methods approach to develop an operational framework for global strategies, policies, and programs that provides programming directions for Universities in general and engineering programs in particular. The second study applies finite mixture models to characterize engineering students’ global competency development patterns. Finally, the third study employs data envelopment analysis to investigate how engineering students are utilizing international experiences in college and to measure the relative efficiency of student’s global competency development.
About the speaker
Scott Streiner is a doctoral candidate in the Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his master’s in industrial and systems engineering in 2013 from North Carolina State University and his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering in 2011 from the University of Pittsburgh.
His research interests include engineering global competency, curricula and assessment; evidence-based teaching practices and curricular innovations applied to misconceptions; and engineering education policy. His funded research explores the nature of global competency development by assessing how international experiences improve the global perspectives of engineering students.
Streiner’s dissertation investigates how best to design and operationalize effective global programming strategies within engineering curricula. His research in evidence-based teaching practices and curricular innovations focuses on reducing misconceptions and improving retention of statistical concepts.
He is an active member in the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) both locally and nationally, as well as the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE).
