Match or mismatch: Engineering faculty beliefs about communication and teamwork versus published criteria

Abstract

Engineering employers, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the engineering accreditation agency ABET continue to identify communication and teamwork as essential for engineering graduates going into professional practice. The desire for students to enhance these and other professional skills has led to an increase in the number of team projects and communication assignments included within engineering courses. However, educational researchers and educators alike know comparatively little about the beliefs and values of current engineering faculty with respect to communication and teamwork, or about how these faculty epistemologies affect approaches to incorporating and evaluating these skills. To address this gap, this paper analyzes data from interview with engineering faculty in light of published criteria for communication and teamwork. As our benchmark for this initial study, we use the VALUE rubrics developed by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU). Preliminary analysis of a subset of the data suggests areas of both alignment and disparity between engineering faculty and the VALUE rubrics. In particular, engineering faculty beliefs align with the rubrics' emphasis on context and purpose and content development in written communication, but reflect less attention to disciplinary genre conventions and sources. In the teamwork domain, engineering faculty recognize the importance of conflict resolution, but offer few other criteria included in the VALUE rubric. At the same time, faculty emphasize the importance of distributing workload and managing the project effectively, an area not wellrepresented by the rubrics. These findings, once refined through analysis of the full data set, offer areas for faculty development, but also suggest important discipline-specific adaptations of the broad-based VALUE rubrics. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2014.