Assessing the impact on intercultural competencies when engineering students solve problems in multicultural teams

This paper describes a research project regarding internationalization and development of intercultural competencies at 4 different engineering educations in Denmark. All Danish engineering education institutes have for several years been educating both Danish and foreign students coming either as exchange students or to take a full degree. Project organized Problem based Learning is used to a high extent at most of the engineering educations in Denmark, using large scale project work (up to 15 ECTS each semester) solved in teams (3-7 students in each team). In more and more situations the teams are culturally mixed and this leads to difficulties in some of the teams, not only due to the cultural differences but also because of different experiences with team work and problem solving, e.g. when a foreign newcomer starts on the first semester of a master education where the Danish students have been solving problems in teams two times a year in all of their bachelor education. In at least four of the engineering education institutes in Denmark experiments on helping mixed student teams to perform better in their project work have been carried out for some years using a classic engineering trial and error approach for improvement, based mostly on student’s semester assessments and not strictly scientific measurements of team performance. In 2009 the Danish center for engineering education (DACIN) started a project to help internationalization in the engineering educations and improve the students’ intercultural competencies. It was decided to start a formal research project to investigate some of the existing experiments helping mixed teams to cope with project work in intercultural teams. During spring 2010 the setup for the research project was developed by a group of representatives from the engineering schools and universities in Denmark and an intercultural researcher that was employed to carry out the actual research. The plan was to investigate the outcome of an experiment at four different engineering educations using mixed teams in the autumn semester 2010, focusing on the development of intercultural competencies amongst the students, especially if there was a measurable influence in their appreciation of working with people from another culture than their own. The setup was to setup a baseline for the individual student’s intercultural competencies at the beginning of the semester, using questionnaires, and then test the impact of the experiments and experiences with multicultural team work at the end of the semester, using a similar questionnaire. This was followed up by questionnaires to the teachers and focus group interview with students at each of the participating educations. One of the experiments was followed closely by a PhD student within anthropology. Hypothesis for the questionnaire was developed in the group of representatives together with the researcher, who based on this then made the first version of the questionnaires, which was tested at each education and corrected before use. The data was collected in the autumn and winter 2010-2011 as planned, and based on the answers in the impact questionnaire questions for the focus group interview was prepared. The interview was carried out in February 2011 and the first results presented at a small seminar March 16th. This paper will explain the setup in more details and present some of the first results of the research project both overlooking all the experiments and going into more details with one of them.