Abstract
The practice of engineering, especially the design process, involves many aspects beyond just the technical and includes such critical components as engineering ethics, sustainability and transferable skills such as communication, leadership and mentoring. Engineering educators often struggle with how to best incorporate these nontechnical aspects within their curricula. Service learning offers an opportunity to do this. The disconnect is that students often view engineering as only the technical number crunching and these other nontechnical components as less important. We report on the assessment of student written reflections across two very different service-learning engineering design projects for the purpose of evaluating student attitudes about these service-learning experiences and to assess their awareness and appreciation of transferable-skills development. In the spirit of service-learning pedagogy, we divided the contents of the written reflections into three categories – academic enhancement, civic engagement and personal growth skills. The commonality across both courses centered on academic enhancements and the value of transferable skills (i.e., leadership, teamwork, negotiation skills, mentoring, scheduling, verbal and written communication skills). Assessments show our current service-learning pedagogy improves students’ understanding of the importance of written and oral presentation skills. However, as of yet, many students do not consider leadership, negotiation skills, design setbacks, scheduling and mentoring skills to be part of “real” engineering.
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Rizzo, D.M., Dewoolkar, M.M., Hayden, N.J. (2013). Transferable Skills Development in Engineering Students: Analysis of Service-Learning Impact. In: Michelfelder, D., McCarthy, N., Goldberg, D. (eds) Philosophy and Engineering: Reflections on Practice, Principles and Process. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7762-0_6
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