Magda Medir

Assessment of Engineering Students’ Leadership Competencies

AbstractLeadership development has become increasingly important in engineering education as companies look for engineers with leadership, communication, and teamwork skills. To embed these competencies into engineering curricula, a competency-based educational model has been implemented in which 4th-year engineering students led design project teams made up of 1st-year students. The study described in this paper had two aims. The first was to determine which leadership competencies were exhibited by the 4th-year students. The second was to assess their perceived leadership effectiveness. We identified leadership competencies using the behavioral event interview technique and measured leadership effectiveness using a 360-degree assessment. The results demonstrate that the student leaders exhibited the following competencies most frequently: commitment to learning, interpersonal communication, teamwork, and results orientation. The results also indicate that the 1st-year students perceived the student lead...

Development of coaching competencies in students through a project-based cooperative learning approach

First-year chemical engineering students carry out a horizontally integrated design project working in teams. The teams are each led by two fourth-year students, one taking on the role of team leader and the other of knowledge manager so that the project is also vertically integrated. Team leaders facilitate project and team management while knowledge managers facilitate the learning process of first-year students in such a way that both are essentially coaches. Fourth-year students experience alternatively both roles during the two semesters (15 weeks) of the academic year. These new roles require a new set of technical and social skills: Team management, facilitative leadership, and project management skills, which are formally introduced in the fourth-year Project Management course and put into practice in the Project Management in Practice course. The real challenge of the whole approach is ensuring that fourth-year students resist the temptation of reproducing the supervisory role of professors in the classical classroom environment, despite the pressure of achieving project objectives, the inexperience of first-year students who are not used to this approach, and the cultural inertia of the professors involved.

Work in progress - assessment of the development of personal and social competencies by students

Universities are becoming increasingly aware of how important it is to equip their students with personal and social competencies such as client orientation or teamwork and cooperation. This paper presents a research project whose aim is to create a comprehensive system of assessment and development of competencies to support the competency-based educational model implemented at the School of Chemical Engineering (ETSEQ) at the University Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain