Integrating teamwork and communication into traditional engineering curricula

• Main Author: Peterson, Michael Thomas
• Language: ENG
• Published: ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst 1998
• Subjects: Industrial engineering|Higher education
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9909203

This dissertation integrates 2 soft skills, communication & teamwork, into a traditional Industrial Engineering course (MIE 353, Engineering Economic Decision Making) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the fall of 1997. This will be considered the program group. A team project, formally presented at the end of the course & graded by neutral observers to pre-set standards, supplemented the lecture material. A comparison or control group was concurrently measured in IE 312, Engineering Economic Analysis, (comparable engineering content & team project requirements, no exposure to communication & teamwork material) at Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts. Multiple assessments took place at both schools to measure performance & attitude differences. A University of Massachusetts alumni survey (same questionnaire) was also conducted to compare to the student data on the importance of communication & teamwork to their career success. Due to limited sample sizes at each school, this research is considered a "pilot study". The preponderance of the assessment data tend to support the Hypotheses. Rationale & motivation for this study follows: Engineering curriculum designers face several diverse stakeholders with often opposing needs. These stakeholders include their customers (the students) & their investing families, society & the local community, industry, graduate schools (both research & application oriented), accreditation boards, & other university departments & schools. Industry, as it always has, requires solid technical foundations; the "hard" skills, such as computer modeling, the sciences, analytic decision making & competence in the specific engineering discipline. Given worldwide competitiveness & complexity, accelerating product & service dynamics, & increasingly sophisticated customers, industry has incremented the hard skills above with a set of "soft" interpersonal skills, such as communication, teamwork, project management, delegation & leadership. To survive & thrive, industry has raised its expectation level of engineering graduates, as well as the engineering schools that produce them. Industry does not want to take on the entire soft training burden.