Understanding cooperative education and internships: The influence on engineering students' problem solving skills

Abstract

Cooperative education is a form of experiential education that allows students to gain experience in their profession. This quantitative study will utilize a national dataset to examine the influence of cooperative education on engineering students' perception of their engineering thinking skills. The objective of this study is to answer the following question: 1) does experience in cooperative education or internship program influences students' self-perceptions of their engineering problem-solving skills? The statistical models controlled for academic ability, social economic status, engineering discipline, time spent in a design competition, urbanization of an institution, and institution's highest degree awarded. The analysis from a national dataset of 2004 seniors (n=4461 from 39 institutions) suggests that students who spent more time in a cooperative education program are better at ensuring that a process or product meets a variety of technical and practical criteria and comparing and judging alternative outcomes than students who have little or no experience in a co-op. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.