Keywords

Engineering, Leadership, Leadership skills

Abstract

Developing and Assessing Leadership in Engineering Students W. Vincent Wilding, Thomas A. Knotts IV, William G. Pitt, and Morris D. Argyle Department of Chemical Engineering, Brigham Young University The Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology at Brigham Young University is focusing on five initiatives: Leadership, Innovation, Global Awareness, Character, Technical Excellence. Efforts in the realm of leadership include freshmen leadership seminars and a required sophomore course entitled Global Leadership in a Technological World. Departments within the college are expected to build on this foundation in the junior and senior years. The Chemical Engineering Department has developed an effective and efficient program to further develop and assess leadership skills. The first challenge in this process was to come up with a working definition of “leadership” with enough substance that we could deal in concrete principles and practices. Through discussions with our Industrial Advisory Board we developed a list of leadership characteristics important in engineering practice which constitutes this working definition. Although there are team experiences in most of our courses, we have designated one course in each semester from the second semester of the sophomore year through graduation in which to focus on and assess leadership skills. In each team experience in these courses each student uses the list of leadership characteristics as a basis forgiving feedback to their team mates. Then each student uses the feedback from his/her teammates to develop a brief plan to make improvements. This plan is then implemented in the next team experience which may be later in the same course, or in a subsequent semester. Feedback, improvement plans, and closing-the-loop evaluations are all compiled in a web-based portfolio which grows with each subsequent experience so that by graduation each student has a rich record of leadership experiences with successes, challenges, and improvements neatly documented. This process of continuous-improvement efforts tied to periodic feedback mimics the professional practice of regular performance evaluations. The entire process is student-driven so that it adds very little to faculty work load. Student engagement and their ability to implement goals can easily be assessed from the portfolio for the purposes of grading. Also, students readily see the value of cultivating their leadership skills, and therefore student buy-in is high.

Original Publication Citation

W. V. Wilding, T. A. Knotts IV, W. G. Pitt, and M. D. Argyle, Developing and Assessing Leadership in Engineering Students, ASEE Annu. Conf. Expos. Conf. Proc., AC 2012-4462 (2012).

Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2012-06-10

Publisher

American Society for Engineering Education

Language

English

College

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering

Department

Chemical Engineering

University Standing at Time of Publication

Assistant Professor

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