Abstract:

The global world requires an essential emphasis on sustainability regarding productivity and industrialization processes, all the more with current environmental issues—water supply, deforestation, climate change—as well as sanitary issues like COVID-19, which permeate throughout and threaten all global activity. At the same time, the new digital era is changing the way we live and we interact, putting the person in the center of organizations and society. Engineers play an important role in this context, since they are actively building the world where we will be living in tomorrow. For all these reasons it is more than ever necessary to strengthen global competence of engineers of the future.

From a theoretical perspective, global and intercultural competence embodies a range of skills, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, some of which are easier to assess than others (Deardorff 2006). The global dimension of engineering practice has long been recognized by many scholars and institutions (Jesiek and Beddoes, 2010, Grigg 2014, Yates 2007). However, nowadays, there is still a lack of integration of human, environmental and ethical issues, which do not usually appear in engineering courses.

The development of the TA VIE project ("Tools for Enhancing and Assessing the Value of International Experience for Engineers") presented here stemmed from an international collaboration of five European HEI institutions in Spain, Italy, France, Sweden and Hungry. The TA VIE project has showed that companies understand the relevance of global competencies and young professionals should improve in those competencies. Companies in the five national contexts participating in the project argue that engineers should deploy these competencies to follow market trajectories and face current challenges.

As a result of the first intellectual output of the project a framework of global competencies for engineers was published (Ortiz-Marcos et al. 2020). Now, in this second part of the project, we are ready to share how to measure these competencies with engineering students using an innovative approach.

A growing body of scholarship has emerged around efforts to define, develop, and assess global competency and related constructs among engineering students and professionals (Jesiek et al., 2018; Jesiek, Zhu, et al., 2014; Johri & Jesiek, 2014). During development of TA VIE project, scenario-based model for the assessment of global competencies was designed. TA VIE project is supported by competence measurement framework (OECD, PISA, 2018; PIAAC; 2012) considering that measurement of competencies is quite sensitive to individual own perception because it deals with self-assessment. Cognitive tests based on a situational approach have been developed, using the so called “scenarios”, which allows the respondent to answer to the situational questions (competence related) and not thinking about his/her own level of competence. Scenario-based and other types of situational assessment techniques represent intriguing alternatives to the self-assessment approaches outlined earlier. The advantage to use the scenarios approach is a stronger validity of the data. These methods have a long history of use, dating back to at least the 1920s (Jesiek & Woo, 2011; PISA, 2018), and typically present subjects with realistic dilemmas, problems, or situations, and then ask them to identify effective (and/or ineffective) actions or responses. In this paper the result of scenarios designed to measure global competencies will be presented.

Keywords:

Global competence, Competence Assessment, Scenario approach, International experience, Engineering.