Critical incident assessment as a tool to reflect on students' emotional response during international experiences

Abstract

International experience was an essential component of the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT)-Sustainable Electronics (SE) Program between Purdue University and Tuskegee University as electronics manufacturing and recycling primarily occur abroad in India, many countries in Africa, and China. During this two-year IGERT-SE program, students visited Delhi and Rajasthan, India to meet with representatives throughout the supply chain including mining and extraction experts, electronics manufacturers, electronics assemblers, non-government organizations, recyclers and waste handlers, and many other subject matter experts. The purpose of the trip was to obtain hands-on, in-person experience visually inspecting and participating in all levels of the electronics lifecycle. Additionally, the students were tasked with learning about sustainable practices from the local experts working in the field and reflecting on areas for improvement. It is well known that traveling abroad immerses students, sometimes for the first time, in an unfamiliar culture and that their emotional response to experiences affects how they perceive the cultural and professional practices of the people and places they visit. To help students process their experiences, the IGERT-SE Program adopted the critical incident assessment (CIA) framework. The CIA was modified for the sustainability in electronics focus of the program in order to best help students understand how their emotional response affects their perception of practices pertaining to sustainability. While literature has shown the effectiveness of this assessment tool in many contexts (e.g. study abroad programs, social work, etc.), to the best of our knowledge, no one has utilized this technique as a method for individuals to assess sustainability in an international culture and framework. The following study analyzes the use of critical incident assessment (CIA) to improve understanding of the complex interactions between environmental, economic, and social/sociopolitical factors during focused educational trips to unfamiliar cultures and workplaces, and the interactions that took place within them as part of the international experience component of the NSF IGERT-SE Program. Results were collected from the students and faculty via a survey to identify factors and practices which were essential to the implementation of this tool in an interdisciplinary setting abroad. The survey was structured using a mixture of matrix questions, Likert scale questions, ranking questions, and open-ended questions. Questions covered topics such as environmental factors (e.g. time of day and location), group dynamics (e.g. group size and demographics) and level of familiarity with the tool. From the responses obtained, best practices are proposed to help enable future educators to utilize the CIA in a maximally impactful manner. Within this work, the authors will explore the usefulness of this tool as a metric to assess the sustainability of the electronics lifecycle in an International setting.