Are engineering students culturally intelligent?: Preliminary results from a multiple group study

Abstract

Engineers and other technical professionals are increasingly expected to work across cultural boundaries and national borders. This need will only intensify in coming years as demographic shifts make the U.S. ever more multicultural, and globalization trends encourage further economic and social interdependencies across disparate geographic regions. Given these trends, engineering educators are being challenged to provide engineering students with a variety of global and professional competencies needed for career mobility and success. At the same time, many reformers are looking beyond traditional bodies of knowledge and skill sets to ask what values, attitudes, and dispositions are important for future engineers. These kinds of "affective" characteristics comprise a key - and yet often overlooked - part of identity formation for many professionals, including engineers. This paper argues that such attributes are especially important for global engineers, who require high levels of cross-cultural competence, which can in turn be understood and operationalized using the multidimensional construct known as Cultural Intelligence (CQ). We begin with a literature review to discuss how cross-cultural competence is typically framed in the engineering education literature, and then review some prior studies of CQ. We then turn to findings from our own empirical, multiple group study of CQ among undergraduate engineering students (n=230) in five different courses/programs at two schools. We more specifically investigate whether a number of key factors impact CQ scores, including prior international experience, foreign language proficiency, gender, and international student status. As discussed, our subjects tended to have higher CQ scores as compared to other undergraduate student populations, likely due to a variety of demographic and programmatic factors. Additionally, students reporting that they had previously lived abroad for two or more months had significantly higher scores across all dimensions of CQ. The paper concludes by discussing some of the implications of our study, along with suggestions for future research. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.