Developing and assessing student's principled leadership skills to achieve the vision for civil engineers in 2025

Abstract

Achieving American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Vision for Civil Engineers in 2025 focuses on student skills needed to serve the profession and meet demands of tomorrow's world and outlines five major areas where civil engineering's will lead society in establishing a sustainable world and raise the global quality of life. Civil engineers are envisioned to be master builders, stewards of the environment, innovators, managers of risk, and leaders of public policy. The ASCE Body of Knowledge (BOK) 2 provides a significant foundation for how engineering programs could prepare future civil engineering students to meet these aspirations. Professional outcomes identified in BOK 2 suggest target levels of cognitive development to adequately prepare undergraduate students. Preparing students to rise to the call of Vision 2025 as professionals requires synthesizing these professional outcomes across overarching concepts, such as principled leadership, so students are ready to serve as stewards of the environment and leaders of public policy. At the same time colleges and universities are faced with the challenge of teaching and assessing a core curriculum needed to provide technical competence versus expansion of the curriculum to address professional outcomes to support this higher vision. Additionally, college and universities often face expectations of multiple accrediting agencies and arduous university policies surrounding accreditation. To address these challenges, The Citadel Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) is adopting a holistic approach to investigate and analyze principled leadership through individual course goals and student extracurricular activities, resulting in evidenced base assessment that can be mapped to outcomes at various institutional levels. If engineering educators are to be successful in developing student leaders, faculty need to improve instruction on leadership development, provide opportunities for students to practice leadership skills in the classroom without direct oversight, and facilitate extracurricular leadership experiences with faculty serving in advisory roles. This paper presents and discusses application of outcome-based threads, specific elements of the principled leadership thread, methods used to document extracurricular leadership activities for undergraduate civil engineering students, and anticipated changes from analysis of the principled leadership thread. Results from this process are being used to create an evidence-based means to raise student cognitive performance levels aligned with principled leadership and other related professional development outcomes. ©American Society for Engineering education, 2013.