Ivan E. Esparragoza

Pre- and Post- Evaluation of Students Interest on Multinational Projects based on Class Standing and Gender

Multinational engineering design projects have been implemented at various academic institutions in order to offer their students exposure to the issues present when work needs to be carried out globally. Such implementation tries to emulate the environment that actually exists in many engineering projects being done nowadays in practice. These experiences is something that academic institutions needs to include and emphasize in their programs, and is gaining acceptance at a variety of colleges and universities worldwide. The importance of such activities is something that students need to be aware because of its benefit, and students should be motivated to participate. The main goal of this study is to determine the level of interest by engineering students participating in a multinational collaborative design project, and to make a comparison of such indicator at the start and at the end of their participation. Such comparison is as a group of students, and as well based on class standing and gender. For this purpose, a survey based on the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) was administered to the students, and data collected provides information on the level of interest or enjoyment that they declare. This interest construct provide an indication of the students’ interests, beliefs, and feelings about the international project that reflect their level of motivation to undertake such task. The results of the comparison indicate the need to define intervention that result in more uniform level of interest by students.

Study on Interest and Perception of Value in Multinational Collaborative Design Projects Among Engineering Students

The level of interest and perceived value of engineering students in a multinational collaborative design project experience is reported in this paper. The report establishes a comparison based on geographical location and class standing of the participants. For this purpose, a survey was used to collect demographic data and students’ feedback on questions based on the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) survey, which permits to evaluate five constructs, being interest and perceived value the ones considered in this work as indicators of motivation. The data was collected from students participating in the collaborative design project. These students were at seven institutions in six countries (USA, Honduras, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, and Italy). The analysis of the data collected shows that students have a high level of interest and value the experience, with some numerical differences based on geographic location and class standing, but only significant difference based on class standing. These results are of importance when considering multinational collaborations in a generation of students moving towards a smart society, indicating a level of motivation that is mainly affected by academic maturity.

Assessment of Interaction in Multinational Projects: A Gender Comparison

The development of multinational collaborative projects in the academia is becoming a practice to educate students with global competencies. This educational approach is being used to expose students to an international experience through project based learning experiences in multinational settings. However, the effectiveness of this approach has not been rigorously assessed. The research team has been working in the understanding of this practice to enhance the overall experience and create a learning environment that fosters the development of global competencies. According to the literature, the interaction among distributed teams is critical in achieving the goals of the team. Therefore, the interaction of students participating in multinational collaborative projects has been a focus of interest for the research team. The aim of this work is to compare, based on the gender, the level of interaction of participants and the use of social interaction during the development of a multinational design project. This paper presents a description of the findings based on the data collected and is the beginning of a subsequent inferential analysis. Keywords— Collaborative projects, multinational, teams’ interaction. Digital Object Identifier (DOI): http://dx.doi.org/10.18687/LACCEI2015.1.1.125 ISBN: 13 978-0-9822896-8-6 ISSN: 2414-6668