Date of Conferral

2022

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Education

Advisor

Darci J. Harland

Abstract

Workplace expectations for engineers have changed in the 21st century due to rapid technology advances, globalization, customer centricity, and team-based design practices, which require engineering graduates to have well-developed emotional intelligence (EI) to perform at high levels in the engineering profession. To fill the gap between engineering employers’ expectations and academic preparation of engineering students, internships in engineering industries have shown many benefits as work-based educational strategies in higher engineering education. However, it is not known whether internships also address needed EI levels in engineering students. The purpose of this basic quantitative study was to determine whether global and domain EI scores of undergraduate engineering students differed based on the participation in an internship in engineering industries. Guided by Petrides’s EI theory and TEIQue-SF questionnaire, a stratified non-probabilistic sample of 206 undergraduate engineering students across U.S. colleges volunteered to provide EI scores in an anonymous online survey. Multivariate analyses of covariance, controlling for age and gender in a posttest-only-with-control-group design, indicated that EI domain scores for sociability and emotionality may be useful to determine levels of EI skills in engineering students in conjunction with internships. Whereas sociability appeared to be slightly higher in students with internships, emotionality did not. The findings of this study may initiate the investigation of the perception, the need, and the challenges of EI development in engineering education and in engineering practice, thereby contributing to positive social change by providing more understanding on how best to educate tomorrow’s holistic engineers.

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