Professional Skill Opportunities Survey: Development and Exploratory Factor Analysis

Changing the Conversation Surrounding Students’ Professional Skills: Making the Case for the Importance of Professional Skills, and More Inclusive Language

“…First, this study encourages engineering education educators to seek to disrupt any lingering traditional view of engineering that keeps professional skills as a separate and often unspoken part of student development. Second, professional skills should be purposefully scaffolded into educational curriculum and explicitly defined, learned, assessed [34,35], and practiced as part of student preparation. Doing so would allow students to learn about and understand their own professional strengths and weaknesses, and seek to further develop any inadequate areas via co-curricular and extra-curricular mechanisms before the end of their formal education journey.…”

Work in Progress: Opportunities for Engineering Undergraduates to Develop Non-Technical Professional Skills during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The project on which this WIP is based is an explanatory mixed methods study. The quantitative piece of our work utilizes two survey instruments, the Undergraduate Study Support (USS) survey [7], [8], and the Professional Skills Opportunities (PSO) survey [9], [10]. The USS is based in our prior work on social capital in engineering education [7], [8], [11], [12]; it asks participants to identify salient people in their social network, and asks about the supports or resources those individuals as well as others provide.…”

“…The resource generator portion of the USS asks participants to identify specific resources they have received related to engineering success, such as someone recommending courses or introducing them to other people in their professional network. The PSO focuses on students' opportunities to practice five professional skills (problem-solving; business and management principles; communication; professional and ethical responsibilities; and shared leadership, which is a combination of teamwork and leadership skills) [9], [10].…”

Conducting the cognitive interview: Sharing experiences and insight from two think-aloud studies

“…As a technique, CI has seen widespread use in this way across many fields including psychology, education, business, and political science [2]. In EER, CI has been used in this way to improve the design of measures of many topics, including professional skills development [3], social capital resources [4], and student responses to instructional strategies [5].…”

“…Cognitive interviewing can be used to achieve the goals above, but it can also be used as an independent method of data collection or to support other analytical techniques. For example, qualitative analyses of CI data in EER, such as those in a recent paper by Li et al [3] can avail researchers of important differences between groups (e.g., demographic groups) of participants with relevant experiences or identities and how these groups might trend differently in survey responses. Triangulating interview analyses with responses is another opportunity to analyze CI data.…”