Journal of Civil Engineering Education

The expectations for engineers to solve complex, global issues are growing at rates that exceed current curricula in engineering education. Studies show that early career engineering students are not confident in their ability to innovate. In this paper, the authors investigated the innovation self-efficacy beliefs (i.e., questioning, observing, experimenting, idea networking, and associational thinking) of first-year engineering students and how those beliefs might differ by gender and engineering discipline. This study used multiple regression to examine the innovation self-efficacy beliefs of 2,678 first-year engineering students. Findings indicate men interested in construction management engineering had significant innovation self-efficacy beliefs in all areas except idea networking. Of those interested in civil engineering, only women were more likely to hold innovation self-efficacy beliefs in the area of experimenting. The authors’ work highlights how students enter college with positive innovation self-efficacy beliefs and uncovers specific behavioral and cognitive skills that can be developed through the engineering curricula.

This research characterized faculty perceptions about the role of cocurricular activities in educating civil engineering students about ethics and/or the societal impacts of engineering (ESI). Among all survey respondents—those who mentored cocurricular activities and those who did not—41% believed that undergraduate students in their program learned about ESI via an engineering professional society, an engineering service group, or other cocurricular activity. In contrast, nearly all of the advisors of cocurricular activities (including research and design competitions) indicated that students learned about one or more among 18 specific ESI topics via the activity. Presentations, discussions, design projects, and working with a community were thought to impact students’ ethical development. Cocurricular activities have the potential for significant contributions to students’ ESI education; however, elective participation may limit their widespread impact.

Recent years have witnessed increased individual sanctions for engineers in the event of a major failure such as the Deepwater Horizon blowout. The medical profession experienced a similar trend, which has been well-documented. Fears of litigation have resulted in defensive medicine, practices aimed at reducing doctors’ risk of legal liability, sometimes to the detriment of patient care. To date, the emergence of defensive engineering has received only minimal attention. An exploratory survey was conducted with Australian engineers ($n=275$) about their responses to personal liability concerns, guided by observable trends among medical doctors. The analysis compared reported engineering practices with those adopted in the medical profession. The prevalence of consideration of liability and adoption of defensive practices is such that defensive engineering can be considered to be established behavior. Engineers are responding particularly by using extra or augmented resources and increased reliance on routine. Some defensive practices are more insidious in medicine than in engineering, giving insight into the potential path these concerns could take if left unchecked, including the impact on current trends in civil engineering education.

This paper reports a 6-year experience teaching building information modeling (BIM) methodology in the undergraduate/graduate architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) program at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. This work is part of the long-term goal of developing a new BIM AEC-based curriculum track for engineering and architecture students at this university. The paper also reports the results of a survey on the student’s perception on how this knowledge has affected their way of working with other disciplines and how it has influenced their professional lives. The adopted approach involved theoretical lectures, computer laboratory practice, student oral presentations, and the complete project of an enterprise. The lectures delivered by specialists with practical experience in the subject exposed the students to BIM concepts. In the laboratory, students were trained in the software tools that enables BIM activity. To develop the project, multidisciplinary teams of students were formed and each team was challenged to emulate the change in process that BIM implies. The task was to develop the complete project of an enterprise considering all different specialties involved in its design, detailing, and planning. More specifically, these specialties consisted of architecture, structural engineering, mechanical and electrical systems, and BIM management. The teams made oral presentations to the client (the professor) and consultants roughly on a weekly basis. In each year, the students´ performance was evaluated in several ways. In particular, a 360° evaluation tool was used, which was crucial to provide feedback to each team member during the exercise. The culmination of this experience is the elaboration of this article that aims to describe the challenges and the successes of the adopted approach.