IN SEARCH OF THE ENGINEERS OF 2020: AN OUTCOMES-BASED TYPOLOGY OF ENGINEERING UNDERGRADUATES

摘要

Looking toward the globalized future, the National Academy of Engineering outlined a strategy in The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century that describes the characteristics and skills that will be required for graduating engineering students to be successful in the workforce of 2020. Producing graduates with the attributes of the engineer of 2020 (hereafter referred to as the "E2020 attributes") who are prepared for this dynamic, competitive global workforce is the current challenge for engineering education. Researchers are tasked to empirically identify ways in which undergraduate engineering programs can adjust educational offerings to reach such a goal. Studies to date have largely focused on ABET criteria and the policies and practices that foster the development of each of these student outcomes. Given the newness and non-mandatory status of the E2020 attributes relative to the ABET accreditation criteria, little research has investigated engineering student outcomes vis-a-vis the Engineer of 2020. This paper examines the suite of knowledge and skills of the engineer of 2020 in combination to develop a typology of E2020 student outcomes. This goal is important because the engineer of 2020 needs a complex skill set to succeed; it is the combination of skills, not the skills in isolation, that must respond to workforce needs of the future. Graduates must have strong fundamental and design skills and be able to work in interdisciplinary teams and possess leadership, communication, and teamwork skills and understand contextual bounds placed on solutions. Rather than explore the development of multidimensional skill sets, most research on engineering students' learning outcomes explores a single skill in isolation, focusing for example on teamwork or design skills or fundamentals rather than understanding these skills in relation to one another. This paper examines the E2020 suite of knowledge and skills to 1) determine whether there are engineering seniors who score highly on all outcomes, and 2) develop and compare profiles of students within an outcomes-based typology for two engineering disciplines.