Education Without Borders: Exploring the Achievement of ABET Learning Outcomes through Engineers Without Borders-USAEngineers of the future are expected to obtain more skills, knowledge, and abilities in theireducation than ever before. Reports continue to expand lists of expected skills to include notonly technical skills, but also more professional, management, leadership, interdisciplinary, andglobal skills. At the same time, the undergraduate engineering curriculum is hard pressed to fitmore credits in an already overcrowded curriculum to meet ABET criteria. Extracurricularengineering activities have been shown to alleviate some of these competing demands. Thisresearch focuses on one such activity, participation in Engineers Without Borders-USA (EWB-USA), a voluntary, global service organization, in order to understand differences in ABETlearning outcomes between students involved and not involved with the organization.Using questions from the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education(CASEE), the authors created a survey to assess students’ perceived ABET learning outcomes.The survey questionnaire was sent to both undergraduate and graduate students within theengineering college at a large US research university, which yielded 566 responses. Responseswere analyzed using the Mann-Whitney U test of two independent samples for three differentcomparison groups: students involved with EWB-USA versus students not involved with theorganization; students actively involved with EWB-USA or something similar to EWB-USA(“EWB-like”) versus students not actively involved with one of these organizations; andstudents actively involved in a professional engineering organization (“active”) versus studentsnot actively involved with one of the professional engineering organizations. For additionalexploration of relationships among variables, CHAID analyses were run to determine the surveyitems that most differentiated between students for each of the three comparison groups.Results showed that EWB-USA students perceived themselves to have slightly higher technicalskills than their peers not involved with the organization, but there were no differences in theirperceived broad and holistic skills. When comparing students that were active in an EWB-likeorganization or in one of the professional engineering organizations with those that were notinvolved or active, additional statistical differences were found. Specifically, the students whowere active perceived themselves to have higher broad and holistic skills than their peers,although no differences in technical skills were found. These results align with previousresearch highlighting the benefit of organizational involvement for the achievement of ABETprofessional skills, and they show that engagement with EWB-USA may help strengthen specifictechnical and professional skills, which can assist in the preparation of more globally preparedengineers of the future. Additional results will be shared in the paper.
Litchfield, K., Javernick-Will, A., and Knight, D. (2014). “Education Without Borders: Exploring the Achievement of ABET Learning Outcomes through Engineers Without Borders-USA.” American Society of Engineering Education International Forum, Indianapolis, IN.