The Engineerng Global Preparedness Index is designed to measure engineering students’ preparenedness for global workforces. It is aligned with both the engineering education perspective and the international education perspective taking at its core. In its present form, there are total of 30 items on the Engineering Global Preparedness Index (EGPI) with three to five response items per subscale. This item distribution and scale total is supported by the item response theory (IRT; Wilson, 2007) for designing difficult to observe (professional skills) latent constructs, as is the case with the construct, global preparedness in engineering. The instrument was designed and tested for validity and reliability in accordance with best practices in instrument design established by both the Educational Testing Service (ETS, 2006) and the National Council of Measurement Education (NCME, 2006) and groundbreaking work on item response theory (IRT) by Mark Wilson (2011).
Subscales for the index were developed accordingly, while also aligning with sound theoretical and empirical research on global citizenry (Meyer, Sleeter, Zeichner, Park, Hoban & Sorensen, 2010; Zeichner, 2009; Ahmed, 2009; Eckhardt Doerry, 2003) and the National Academy of Engineering’s (2005) expectations for engineering global preparedness. Four important subscales are utilized as sub-constructs in the described EGPI. The subscales (or sub-constructs) of the EPGI are described as follows:
- Global Engineering Ethics: Depth of concern for people in all parts of the world; sees moral responsibility to improve life conditions through engineering problem solving and to take such actions in diverse engineering settings.
- Global Engineering Efficacy: Belief that one can make a difference through engineering problem solving; support for one’s perceived ability to engage in personal involvement in local, national, international engineering issues and activities towards achieving greater good using engneering problem solving and technologies.
- Engineering Global-centrism: Valuing what is good for the global community in engineering related efforts, not just one’s own country or group; making judgements based on global needs for engineering and associated technologies, while not focusing on ethnocentric standards.
- Engineering Community Connectedness: Awareness of humanity and appreciation of interrelatedness of all peoples and nations and the role that engineering can play in improving humanity, solving human problems through engineering technologies, and meeting human needs across nations.
- This instrument may be used for college and university students and for community college students. For additional information related to this instrument, please contact Dr. Gisele Ragusa at ragusa@usc.edu