Preliminary Results of an NSF Sponsored Cross Institutional Study for Assessing the Spectrum of International Undergraduate Engineering Educational Experiences and IDI Results of Short-Term Study Abroad (University of Rhode Island)

University XX participated in an NSF sponsored cross institutional study for assessing the spectrum of international undergraduate engineering educational experiences. XX was one of eleven schools that participated in the spring of 2016 (several more schools will be added in Fall 2016). The PIs formed a multidisciplinary team from four universities (Y1, Y2, Y3 and Y4) which investigates how the broad spectrum of international experiences both in and outside of formal curricula impact engineering students’ global preparedness. Its four major objectives are delineated into three separate, but interconnected studies (i.e., Delphi, mixed-methods, and cross-institutional) combined with a dissemination system. The author presents an analysis of the preliminary University XX results of the third study within this work, an in-depth study to analyze engineering students’ global preparedness as the result of their academic and non-academic international experiences. The instrument of the Global Perspective Inventory (GPI) was used to compare GPI scores of engineering freshmen and seniors with and without international experiences. We are reporting on the preliminary analysis of data of University XX provided by one of the PIs. According to those data, University xx students turned out to have some of the highest Global Perspective Inventory (GPI) scores across all 11 schools for senior students who only had international experiences during college and for seniors who have had experience both before and during college. When comparing the GPI scores at XX who have never had an international experience to those students who only had experiences in college, one can see a large effect of the international experiences that students are having during their college years. Across all three GPI dimensions, the effect sizes (measured by Cohen’s D) are all large (above 0.80) and are consistently higher than the other schools in the study. The effect sizes for the XX students in this category are also the most consistent across all GPI dimensions. In other words, while some schools might have had larger effect sizes in certain GPI dimensions, XX is the only school in the sample that have statistically large effect sizes across all dimensions of the GPI when comparing seniors with no experience to seniors with experience before and during college. Can we conclude from these results that the efficacy of the international programs and opportunities that XX offers its engineering student population is very high? What sort of programming might have led to the strong scores? How might the different types of experiences offered at XX relate to students’ global perspectives