Confirmatory Evidence for a Survey of Skill and Attitude Development on Engineering Teams

This research-to-practice paper describes an ongoing project that 1) seeks to gather validity evidence for a survey of engineering student teaming attitudes and skills and 2) identifies what skills and attitudes engineering students develop over time and to what degree. Teamwork is an essential skill for engineering students. The skill's effectiveness has been studied extensively, but little work has been done that explores the learning of teamwork as a set of malleable skills and attitudes. Our project seeks to develop and test a survey of engineering skills and attitudes to understand how students' teamwork skills develop over time. In our prior work, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of our items using half of our data and identified the existence of 16 factors. This work sought to use the second half of our data to gather confirmatory evidence. Of our 16 initial factors, we found that 15 passed our secondary validity evidence checks. Our findings indicate that we have a strong survey of skills and attitudes that we can use to begin our work of understanding how engineering students' skill and attitude development happens over time. Our future work will engage in this longitudinal effort.