Assessment of a Sustainability Program in Graduate Civil and Environmental Engineering Education

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1 Assessment of a Sustainability Program in Graduate Civil and Environmental Engineering Education Judith A. Perlinger, Kurt G. Paterson, Alex S. Mayer, Veronica W. Griffis, Kirsten L. Holles Civil & Environmental Engineering Department Michigan Technological University, Houghton, USA Abstract The engineering professions are becoming increasingly international and oriented towards a sustainability mindset. To enable graduate students in the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department at Michigan Technological University to prepare to meet these demands, the National Science Foundation awarded the University a Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) grant that enabled 45 students in six CEE degree programs to receive $5,000-$10,000 scholarships in The Michigan Tech S-STEM Program was designed to advance a global outlook of economic and social prosperity that protects the environment through various means. A complementary goal was to advance intercultural competency. The S- STEM scholars knowledge of and attitudes toward sustainability and intercultural competency was assessed during the grant period. Pre-/post-intercultural competence assessment results were similar, however, through coursework, one sub-group of scholars displayed increased intercultural competence in pre/post assessment. Emergent content analysis of scholar written materials suggests that maturation in scholar perspectives, balancing engineering with community, economic, and environmental realities, occurred during the scholarship periods. Keywords STEM education; engineering; sustainability; intercultural competency I. INTRODUCTION The engineering professions are becoming increasingly international and oriented towards a sustainability mindset. While sustainability conceptualizations in other fields incorporate the necessary human element as the governing factor in subjective design decisions, sustainability in engineering is rarely perceived in this light. Furthermore, the social and cultural dimensions of sustainability are not present in the majority of sustainable engineering courses in higher education institutions [1]. To enable graduate students in six degree programs in the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department at Michigan Technological University to prepare to meet these demands, the National Science Foundation awarded the University a Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S- STEM) grant. The Michigan Tech S-STEM Program was designed to advance a global outlook of economic and social prosperity that protects the environment. A complementary goal was to advance intercultural competency. A key means to advance this outlook was the creation of a novel mentoring scheme that engaged scholars, faculty in CEE and eight additional units of Michigan Tech, as well as off-campus experts from academic, government, non-government, and tribal organizations (inter)nationally. The grant enabled 45 students in six degree programs (MS Civil Engineering, MS Environmental Engineering, MS Environmental Engineering Science, Peace Corps Master s International MS, PhD Civil Engineering, PhD Environmental Engineering) to receive $5,000-$10,000 in annual scholarships during the grant. Scholars gained experience in conduct of research in a two-semester reciprocal mentoring project on a sustainability topic in groups composed of at least one MS and one PhD scholar, and one faculty member. Scholar education activities included required enrollment in a course on life cycle assessment, in which the scholars conducted a life cycle assessment project. Scholars were also required to enroll and participate in the Environmental Engineering graduate seminar. Their participation involved facilitating colloquia discussions on the topic of their reciprocal mentoring projects (described below) with faculty and graduate students in the CEE Department (and others who attended the colloquia), and in-so-doing informing and engaging the skills of those who attended who were not directly involved in reciprocal mentoring projects. The colloquia provided means to extend reciprocal mentoring to those attending. Scholar research activities included reciprocal mentoring projects. Scholars participated in reciprocal mentoring projects for the duration of their scholarship. The reciprocal mentoring model was created through the S-STEM Project as a way to improve the traditional model in which there is one-way flow of knowledge and information from a faculty member to a student. According to the model, research development is based upon two-way knowledge transfer among all participant pairs: groups of faculty participate with scholar researchers to share a broader perspective of science, engineering and sustainability expertise. Doctoral scholars integrate sustainability knowledge at new research interfaces, then share with the faculty, and transfer research methods to masters scholars; masters scholars share the subtleties of implementing research with doctoral scholars and applications in practice with faculty. Using this novel reciprocal mentoring model, the program facilitated increased mentoring relationships among /13/$ IEEE

2 students as well as faculty within and outside CEE and offcampus. Programmatic activities included regular program meetings in which scholars provided updates on reciprocal mentoring projects, discussed papers and documentaries covering a range of sustainability science and engineering topics, and encounters with professionals in sustainability science and engineering from outside the University. These encounters included listening to formal presentations, discussion in informal groups or individually on topics related to sustainability science and engineering, and career path mentoring. In addition, doctoral scholars had the opportunity to apply for funding to travel to conferences or to work with MS scholars in developing countries on sustainability projects. While knowledge, skills, attitudes, and identity may evolve through participation in any sustained learning environment, two attributes were of main interest to this program: cultural and sustainability competencies. Two research questions posed were: Did individual CEE graduate student scholars or certain groups of scholars demonstrate advancement in intercultural competence during the program? Did these scholars/groups demonstrate progress in understanding of environmental, economic, and social aspects of sustainability? Methodologies used to assess cultural and sustainability competency and key findings are discussed, followed by presentation of the results of the research. II. METHODS A. Assessment of Intercultural Competence Cultural competency is a relative measure of one s ability to interact with people from different cultures [2, 3]. The value of cultural competency in engineering is grounded in enhancing the effectiveness in working on teams with engineers, scientists, etc. from diverse races and cultural backgrounds. Its value is also evident in understanding the needs of worldwide clients who will use the engineered product or project, define problems differently, and work across cultural boundaries. Many learning through service experiences, especially those related to international efforts (such as Michigan Tech s Peace Corps Master s International (PCMI) Program), require students to work in a culture entirely different from their own. The impact of such efforts on how students work in a different cultural norm is of value to understand their learning. There were two critical motivations for attempting to assess intercultural competency in our S-STEM scholars: 1. our program design required reciprocal mentoring research teams; each were inherently multi-cultural regardless of their makeup; and 2. our program focused on sustainability; past evidence [4] suggests that engineers tend to give least attention to the social domain of sustainability in their project work as compared to environmental or economic concerns. The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) is a crossculturally valid and reliable method to assess intercultural competence development [5]. The IDI is suggestive of a This research is supported through a grant from the National Science Foundation, Grant No. DUE student s proficiency at working with others who view the world differently. The IDI is available as an online 50- question tool but requires a qualified administrator for use. While the IDI provides quantitative data, its results are difficult to interpret without further awareness of the test subject (e.g., from observation, examination of project documentation, and assessment of peer-mentoring feedback). Due to its cost ($11/test) and time for completion (30-60 minutes), the IDI was administered in a pre/post S-STEM program involvement. The IDI yields quantitative results, placing the student along a spectrum of intercultural sensitivity from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism in stages of denial, defense, reversal, minimization, acceptance, and adaptation [6]. The IDI produces two scores, a perceived orientation (PO, i.e., where the student thinks they are on the spectrum) and a developmental orientation (DO, i.e., where the student actually lies on the spectrum). Our evaluation plan focused primarily on the DO, although the gap between PO and DO was also examined as a measure of progress. B. Assessment of Advancement in Understanding of Sustainability Although sustainability initiatives have infiltrated engineering curricula and research over the past decade, many engineering faculty are not certain of the meaning of sustainability in the context of engineering, or how educational experiences should be designed (let alone assessed) to address the issues [7]. While sustainability conceptualizations in other fields incorporate the necessary human element as the governing factor in subjective design decisions, sustainability in engineering is rarely perceived in this light. Furthermore, the cultural and social dimensions of sustainability are not present in the majority of sustainable engineering courses in higher education institutions [1]. The S-STEM Program introduced a project-based learning experience and multi-level mentoring network to address some of these concerns. To assess understanding of sustainability among S-STEM scholar participants, we took advantage of an instrument currently under development [8]. This tool, Sustainable Engineering through Service Learning (SESL), is being developed through NSF sponsored research and assesses three dimensions of sustainability mastery: self-efficacy (e.g., choices, efforts, and persistence), value (e.g., beliefs and interests), and affect (e.g., attention, character, conscience). SESL is available as a two-part evaluation, a forty-question online survey and an open-ended essay to a sustainable engineering design challenge scenario. For our program, due to a limited number of trained scenario essay evaluators and assessment time and resources, only the online survey portion of SESL was used in our evaluation strategy in a pre/post approach. To further assess potential connections between learning experiences and outcomes, an emergent content analysis was performed on all final reports submitted by scholars on their reciprocal mentoring project research (n=25; reports were written by project teams). The nearly 80,000 words contained in the reports were examined for frequency. Those words used

3 more than ten times were included in the analysis. These (132 resulting) keywords were thereafter binned into one of three sustainability categories: environment, economics, or society. The total frequencies of words in those bins were summed and normalized to the category with the maximum frequency. III. RESULTS A. Demographics Fractions of female scholars were 33%, 43%, 52%, and 50% in Years 1-4, respectively, for an average of 48%. Over the entire project minorities represented 13% of all scholars, with one scholar of Asian race and five scholars who were of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. The fraction of scholars who were Hispanic/Latino (8%) was half the fraction of the U.S. population that was Hispanic in 2010 (16%), the year a spike in college enrollment of Hispanics of 24% occurred [9]. The program exhibited higher diversity over the grant period than the Michigan Tech CEE Department. Department percentages for race and ethnicity were relatively constant over the grant period, whereas for gender there was an increase in the fraction of female graduate students from ca. 30% to ca. 40%, for a 4-year average over this period of 32% in comparison with the 48% of all scholars who were female in this period. The fraction of S-STEM female faculty mentors was lower at 20%. The fractions of scholars that were Asian or Black/African American was lower than those of the Department (2% as compared to 5% and 0% as compared to 1%, respectively); however, the fraction of Hispanic/Latino scholars was 8%, four times higher than that of graduate students in CEE (2%) and faculty mentors (0%). The greater gender and ethnic diversity of the scholars as compared to their faculty mentors provided opportunities for faculty mentors to interact with scholar mentors with a broadened scope in world views and experiences in the reciprocal mentoring experiences. B. Intercultural Diversity Inventory While sample pools were too small to draw statistically significant conclusions, information can be gathered about sub-cohorts for semi-quantitative comparisons. The findings for intercultural competency, as expressed by the IDI, are given in Table 1 for scholars who completed the pre- and postprogram evaluations. Changes in intercultural competency are computed as the difference in post- and pre-program evaluations divided by the average of the two scores. While percent changes were small (for all scholars, an average increase of 1.8%), past work suggests changes in the > ±5% range are difficult to manifest without a significant experience (either planned major intervention, or unplanned culturally disruptive event). In general, women increased in intercultural competency, whereas men decreased; PCMI scholars increased, whereas MS/PhD scholar counterparts decreased; civil engineering scholars increased more, with environmental engineering scholars having higher competency. The 11.6% Table 1. Intercultural competency as determined by the Intercultural Development Inventory, developmental orientation (DO) scores. Only scholars with pre and post scores were included (n=29). Sub-cohorts IDI (pre) IDI (post) Change (%) Female (n=17) Male (n=12) PhD (n=3) MS (n=2) PCMI (n=24) Civil Eng. (n=7) Env. Eng. (n=22) decrease in pre/post IDI for the small group of PhD scholars may be meaningless. For example, the result could be explained by one scholar making an error on the post test. The most recent PCMI cohort had more information/knowledge in the form of a required curriculum including a new course on Cultural Dimensions of International Immersion and Research. (A separate, unpublished examination of the 22 (of the 24 in Table 1) PCMI scholars in that course showed a 9% increase in IDI over the one-semester course intervention.) Using Hammer s IDI scale [5; Figure 1], plotted as a group, most scholars in this S-STEM cohort were found to have a minimization cultural view; effectively, they see the commonalities among cultures as their main feature. (The three PhD scholars that completed pre/post evaluation would be categorized as possessing a defense mindset, a view that one cultural perspective is better than others). Through their involvement in the S-STEM Program, most scholars moved somewhat to the right in the spectrum, inching toward an acceptance framework (a cultural view towards accepting that various cultural perspectives are present and relevant; Table 1). These results suggest that this group of engineers progressed in intercultural competence during the scholarship period. C. Sustainable Engineering through Service Learning Changes observed in pre- and post-program scores for the three independent SESL sub-scales (sustainable engineering self-efficacy, value, and affect) provide some clues to program impacts: self-efficacy changed little, value decreased, and affect increased dramatically (Table 2). Figure 1. Intercultural Development Inventory score spectrum mapped to Bennett s [6] developmental model of intercultural sensitivities and the scale of Hammer et al. [5]. Approximate positions of S-STEM degree objective sub-cohorts are presented.

4 Table 2. Normalized sustainable engineering index sub-scores (sub-scores sum to unity). Only scholars having pre and post scores were included (n=26). Self-Efficacy Value Affect Pre Post Change 3.41% -10.4% 9.60% In other words, on a group average basis, these students claim to have little change to their sustainable engineering abilities (self-efficacy), care less about sustainability (value), but are more attuned to sustainability. The change in value sub-scores may seem contradictory, but an explanation may be found in the high initial score (pre) and in a common observation of more experienced students that nothing is sustainable. This view may simply indicate maturation of perspective, balancing engineering with community, economic, and environmental realities. It may also indicate an increased pessimism of the scholars in regards to the potential for the public to make lifestyle changes that promote sustainability. Stepping away from group averages, Figure 2 displays the pre- and post-program positioning of each scholar (n=26) in a three-dimensional space representing the SESL sub-scales. As hinted at by the table above, the general movement is to the right, indicating a dominant shift in the affect sub-scale, and a decrease in value. Comparisons of SESL assessment results by gender, program (PCMI, MS, PhD) and degree (civil/environmental engineering) cohorts did not yield significant results due to small sample sizes. Self-reported self-efficacy results (not shown) were for the most part stable. Male scholar selfefficacy was generally lower pre but similar to female selfefficacy post (9.8% increase overall in males). Lower (than MS and PhD scholars) and similar pre/post scores were reported by PCMI scholars. Comparisons among the subcohorts for sustainable engineering value indicated that women finished with bigger decreases (-9.2%, but still higher scores) than their male counterparts. PCMI scholars decreased more than other majors (-9.9%), whereas civil engineering majors decreased the most among all sub-cohorts examined (- 14.4%). Women and PCMI scholar groups started with the highest scores, and may simply be re-calibrating their perspectives on sustainability after an academic year of wrestling with real projects, interacting in group discussions, and better appreciating multiple disciplinary perspectives through mentoring. Civil engineering, women, and PCMI scholar groups made large gains in affect (35.5%, 21.1%, and 20.0%, respectively), suggesting these students became more attuned to sustainability during the scholarship period. While the S-STEM participants are certainly influenced by other academic forces, by the end of the S-STEM Program, these groups all reported dramatic gains in their abilities to be aware of and act on sustainability issues within their work and lives. D. Emergent Content Analysis Scholars explored mostly environmental, then economic, and lastly, societal aspects of sustainability in their research projects (Figure 3). Terms related to economics were used at 77% the frequency of terms related to environment, whereas societal terminology was used less than half as frequently, 45%. This data is aligned with the assessment findings above and with curricular coverage for many graduate scholars in civil and environmental engineering. However, further research is needed to determine whether the lack of societal focus found in the scholars, as expressed by these research communications, is a result of lower cultural/awareness competencies, or of limited exposure to these domains in college education. It is likely even more challenging for the general engineering populace to base engineering practices on social, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainability. These scholars are pre-disposed to be interested in sustainability, and in the case of PCMI scholars, in community development as well. Figure 2. Representation of sustainable engineering index by its three subscales (self-efficacy, value, and affect). Only scholars having pre and post scores are displayed (n=26). Figure 3. Sustainability content frequency analysis of final research project reports submitted over all years of the S-STEM Project (n=25; 79,769 words). Frequency numbers are normalized to frequency over maximum sector (Environment).

5 IV. CONCLUSION Comparison of the results presented here and CEE Department-wide results would be of value in order to assess how these cohorts view cultures and consider the dimensions of sustainability differently. Such a comparison might lead to the finding that, during the project, the S-STEM cohort progressed in these areas relative to all CEE students. If we are to promote development of engineers having balanced worldviews of cultures and a sustainability mindset as the world demands [10-13], assessment of intercultural and sustainability competency in education programs is essential. REFERENCES [1] Allen, D., B. Allenby, M. Bridges, J. Crittenden, C. Davidson, C. Hendrickson, S. Matthews, C. Murphy, & D. Pijawka Benchmarking Sustainable Engineering Education: Final Report. EPA Grant X , December. [2] Bielefeldt, A.R Engineering for Developing Communities, Cultural Competency, and Diversity, Poster in Special Session S1E -- Communities of Practice in Engineering Education: How Do We Investigate Diversity and Global Engineering? Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference. Milwaukee, WI, Oct , [3] Downey, G.L., Lucena, J.C., Moskal, B.M., Parkhurst, R., Bigley, T., Hays, C., Jesiek, B.K., Kelly, L., Miller, J., Ruff, S., Lehr, J., and Nichols-Belo, A The globally competent engineer: Working effectively with people who define problems differently. Journal of Engineering Education, April 2006, vol. 95, no. 2, pp [4] Paterson, K.G. and V.J. Fuchs Development for the other 80%: engineering hope. Journal for Australasian Engineering Education, 14(1): [5] Hammer, M.R., M.J. Bennett and R. Wiseman Measuring intercultural sensitivity: The intercultural development inventory. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. 27(4): [6] Bennett, M. J Towards ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In Paige (ed), Education for the Intercultural Experience, Intercultural Press, Yarmouth, ME, pp [7] Hoffmann, S., A. Pawley, R. Rao, M. Cardella, M. Ohland Defining Sustainable Engineering : A Comparative Analysis of Published Sustainability Principles and Existing Courses. In Proceedings from the Annual American Society of Engineering Education Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia. AC , 14 pp. [8] Wiggins, J., M. McCormick, C. Swan, A. Bielefeldt, and K. Paterson Students and Sustainability: Assessing Students Understanding of Sustainability from Service Learning Experiences. In Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference. Vancouver, BC. AC pp. [9] Nieves, E. 1 September Latino College Enrollment Spikes, 24% Growth from 2009 to Pa lante Latino growth-from-2009-to-2010/. Accessed [10] National Academy of Engineering The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century, Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 118 pp. [11] National Academy of Engineering Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press. 208 pp. [12] American Society for Civil Engineering Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21st Century: Preparing the Civil Engineer for the Future, 2nd Edition, 191 pp., ASCE. [13] American Academy of Environmental Engineers Environmental Engineering Body of Knowledge, AAEE, 91 pp.