INTEGRATING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT MODULES IN THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM

摘要

A lack of professional development opportunities has been reported as a significant reason for choosing to drop out of the engineering major at the undergraduate level. To address this issue, we focused on creating and piloting "full" and "mini" professional development modules as part of a multi-university National Science Foundation funded CCLI Phase II effort on "Professional Development Gateways in Social Learning Settings." The "full" modules were developed specifically for engineering and other STEM students to be folded or integrated directly into existing gateway and introductory courses where professional development is a pervasive underpinning to the course objectives. These modules were designed to be covered in a 50 minute classroom period with time for discussion. Contextualizing professional development outcomes by integrating them into existing gateway and professional issues courses provided significant improvements in student awareness (meta-cognition) of the professional world. For the cases where no significant improvement was found, observations suggest that in order for the professional development intervention to be effective, the course format must be sufficient to adequately develop the instructional intervention strategies. Thus, to aid in this issue, "Mini" modules were developed to provide an additional means of integrating professional development issues into the curriculum. In this case, we anticipated the modules being used in capstone design courses where professional development issues are imminent in the student's career but course objectives broaden well beyond professional development. The "Mini" modules are brief overviews or subsections of the full module topics, and consist of four or five slides for easy integration. This paper focuses on the development and summary of these "Mini" modules.