A situational judgement test for engineers to evaluate their professional strengths & weaknesses

Abstract

This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a 23 item Situational Judgement Test (SJT) with scenarios tailored to the engineering profession. The SJT was developed around the PREFER model, with the support of professional engineers and academics in 11 panel discussions. In total 53 engineering professionals and academics were consulted during the development of both the item stems and the item responses of the SJT. Subsequently, the SJT was rolled out to 334 final year and masters students enrolled in engineering programmes at TU Dublin and KU Leuven respectively. After taking part in the test, students were sent automated reports on their performance and the test which highlighted how their response compared to a response gathered from a professional engineer with feedback on how they might improve their competence in a particular area, while also commending their performance in other areas. The results of this study highlight that 8 SJT items had significantly lower mean scores when compared with the test-mean. These items, which were related to perseverance, client focus, vision, planning and organising, solution orientation, team player, work organisation, clear communication and networking all represent potential competence deficits in the population of final year and master students that were tested. This work adds to engineering education scholarship by providing an engineering-specific SJT that enables educators to identify areas of relative strength and weakness in students’ professional judgements in order to better prepare them for their future careers.

Enhancing (future) students’ sense of belonging to increase diversity and inclusion in engineering

“…Based upon the PREFER model, two innovative tests were developed: PREFER Explore is a personal preference test, aiming to inform students about the three professional roles and their personal preference for one (or two, three) of them [7], [38]. PREFER Match is a situational judgment test, aiming to trigger a process of reflection on students' drives by measuring to what extent engineering students are able to judge professional situations [8], [39].…”

Mentoring Engineering Educators with an Entrepreneurial Mindset – Focused SOTL Professional Development Experience

“…One main goal of the EER is to fill meet industry demands for engineering graduates with knowledge and professional skills (teamwork, communication, decision making, critical thinking, etc.) a acquired through educational approaches [14,15]. In general, SOTL tends to be more practitioner-oriented while EER tends to be more theory and research-oriented.…”