Goal:

Increase student engagement by connecting learning outcomes to career skills

Faculty are a primary source of career advice

• one third of students receive career guidance from faculty
• Equity focus:
  • create career conversations in class
  • connect to students without family+friends in profession
  • address perceived barriers to careers

Connecting is key to learning

• Connections through lived experiences
  • create new neuron paths:
  • reinforcing learning
• Education is experience

Experiment 1: How many soccer scores can you remember?

• 62 students given soccer (football) knowledge questionaire
• asked to memorize scores from past English and Scottish matches
• the soccer knowledge questionaire was directly correlated to memorized score count

Experiment 2: Guided and unguided concepts

• Groups of medical students given Instructor notes, guided+unguided
  • Guided notes increase exam scores
  • Too much instructor guidance can decrease scores
• Students needed to build personal connections to material

Building lived experience connections

• Instructors can scaffold connecting exercises
• Good practice for newcomers to your field
• We can’t connect material to individuals’ lived experiences # Students want career skills

NACE Career Competencies

Map ABET Learning Outcomes

Methods: Connect career skills to learning outcomes

•  × 2 Mechanical Engineering courses:
  • Computational Mechanics
  • Engineering Dynamics.
• 10-15 sample connections
• Students provide feedback in week 8 and week 15
• 15-week semester
• week 15 optional
• text vectorizing and k-means clustering for free response

Result: Students connect learning to skills

• students identified 5-6 career competencies in assignmennts
• 26% of students still connected leadership to course experience

Clustered responses in free response text

Final voluntary ABET connection (collection)

• more than 75% of the students submitted an assignment
• connected assignment to career skill.

Conclusions: communication is key

• students are intrisically motivated to connect their experience to career skills
• 75% of students completed voluntary assignments connected to careers
• The course assignments unchanged and align with ABET outcomes
• map to NACE career competencies creates scaffold for students
• establish vocabulary consistent between
  • administrative (ABET) goals
  • faculty goals (motivation of students)
  • student goals (career competencies)

Future work: reduce my work

• enable students to continuously provide feedback
• align assignments to career skills and therefore ABET
• Here, monitor changes in curriculum, prerequisites, and even instructor improvements
• monitor breadth of coverage across career skills
• skills map to ABET outcomes → continuous data collection of alignment and improvement