Assessment of engineering students' global awareness knowledge, strategic processing and interest

Undergraduate engineering students are expected to develop an understanding that engineering solutions can have global implications. Perceptions on engineering solutions by people from different cultures can be very different, and globally aware engineers need to understand and anticipate these perception differences. As engineering programs strive to instill the requisite learning to produce this outcome, a fundamental question to address is whether global awareness can be assessed as a part of engineering students' progress in the engineering curriculum. This article proposes and validates a new instrument, based on a developmental model-the Model of Domain Learning (MDL)-to gauge engineering students' growth in global awareness. Presented research responds to the following research questions: (i) Does engineering students' global awareness improve throughout their education? (ii) Do the expected relations among components of theMDL(i.e., knowledge, strategic processing, and interest) hold for the domain of global awareness?Atotal of 425 students, enrolled in 18 different engineering programs in a US land-grant university, participated in this study. The study findings supported that, (i) as they progress in their education, engineering students' knowledge, strategic processing, and interest increase in tandem for the domain of global awareness, (ii) the MDL can serve as a framework for assessing engineering students' development of global awareness.