Experiences and Perceptions of Engineering Students towards a Cross-Disciplinary Course Using Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Engineering students require nontechnical skill sets to combat the 21st century’s complex engineering challenges in addition to possessing technical skills. To provide multidisciplinary experience to undergraduate engineering students and to study the formation of engineers, a research team at West Virginia University offered a multidisciplinary course in two academic semesters. In this course, engineering students collaborated with students from social science disciplines to solve a complex, open-ended transportation engineering problem. Focus group sessions were conducted among the participating engineering students at the end of both semesters to document their experiences and perceptions of the cross-disciplinary course. This study applied unsupervised machine learning–based text mining approaches to extract students’ relevant experiences and perceptions from the focus group text data. From the analysis, four clusters were identified, where engineering students highlighted their awareness/understanding of the cross-disciplinary majors, appreciation of the cross-disciplinary majors, and communication and collaboration issues in the group presentation and report writing tasks. Engineering students initially perceived challenges in working with cross-disciplinary majors that eased as the semester progressed. Students acknowledged their lack of nontechnical skills as engineers. They appreciated the ideas the social science students provided, which helped them improve their problem-solving skills and become more productive. Students also highlighted several improvements for the future offerings of the course (e.g., more focused and concise communication among professors and peers) and suggested possible approaches to resolve the concerns. The findings of this research provide an in-depth understanding of the potential of multidisciplinary courses in the engineering curriculum and ways to enhance the experiences of participating engineering students in such offerings in the future.