Abstract
Engineering culture is a complex phenomenon that needs to be understood to promote the value of professional skills and not only the technical skills that have been traditionally valued in engineering. This study investigates ways to identify patterns of cultural traits in undergraduate engineering students, by using and validating an instrument originally developed to measure national culture. This study was conducted in three phases: in Phase 1, we validated an instrument to measure engineering culture based on Hofstede’s model of national culture. In this phase, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis and a reliability analysis with responses of 1261 undergraduate students. In phase 2, we identified how the dimensions in Hofstede’s model mapped and differed between academic engineering disciplines. To accomplish that goal, we conducted descriptive statistics and an analysis of the variance of responses of 794 engineering students. In phase 3, we analyzed if some of Hofstede’s dimensions are inherent to prospective engineering students or if they were influenced by their specific engineering programs. In phase 3, we collected data from 1,330 first-year engineering students and compared them with data from the same students at the end of their first year. Moreover, for three specific majors, we compared them with data of 261 senior students. Results demonstrated the validity of the instrument in academic disciplines and showed that the uncertainty avoidance dimension of Hofstede’s model differed between three engineering majors (i.e., ECE, ISE, and CS). This dimension did not differ after the first year but changed in the senior year.
Highlights
Since the establishment of ABET’s EC2000 in 1997, the engineering education community has been striving to determine the factors, pedagogies, content, and strategies that can help undergraduate engineering students develop the skills they require to become successful professional engineers
ISE uncertainty avoidance elements scores of engineering culture were lower than the uncertainty avoidance scores of ECE and CS, and the independence dimension of ECE major is lower than ISE, AE, and MIE
Our results in phase 3 indicate that the differences in uncertainty avoidance elements increased overtime: ISE scores of risk aversion (RSK) and ambiguity intolerance (AMB) are lower in the senior year whereas ECE and CS scores of RSK and AMB increase in the senior year
Summary
Since the establishment of ABET’s EC2000 in 1997, the engineering education community has been striving to determine the factors, pedagogies, content, and strategies that can help undergraduate engineering students develop the skills they require to become successful professional engineers. We argue that it is important to understand the complex phenomenon of engineering culture in order to find a different approach to promote the value of professional skills and effectively integrate them into the engineering curriculum. Without a better understanding of engineering culture, promoting changes becomes challenging as engineering educators and administrators might not be familiar with the complexity of this phenomenon. We considered Hofstede’s theory to be adequate to explore this phenomenon because of how widely it has been implemented to study culture in different contexts around the world, and because of the authors’ familiarity with its use in engineering education (Murzi Escobar, 2016; Murzi, Martin, McNair, & Paretti, 2014, 2015; Murzi, Martin, McNair, & Paretti, 2016)
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