WHAT IS AN ENGINEER: STUDY DESCRIPTION AND CODEBOOOK DEVELOPMENT

There are still many questions to answer regarding the implementation and ongoing use of the CEAB graduate attributes (GAs) to guide engineering education content and student progression. How well do our students know and understand the twelve GAs? Which ones do they find most important? Do the knowledge and importance of the GAs vary over the course of students’ programs, or among institutions? Do students’ definitions of an engineer reflect the GAs? How do the definitions reflect students’ evolving understanding of engineering identity? Given the similarity of purpose, philosophy, and complementarity of questions and methods regarding the student perspective on engineering, the GAs, and their development, researchers from three institutions across Canada joined forces to conduct a national study. The overarching objectives of the study are to provide insight on how undergraduate students’ engineering identities develop through the course of their programs using the CEAB GAs as a normative framework, and enable meaningful comparisons of the GAs rankings and learning cultures at the three institutions. The objectives of this paper are to present an overview of the study development, and describe the methods used to develop the French and English codebooks for analysis of the qualitative data. We discuss the disambiguation of the codes and lexicon with particular attention to the concepts of professionalism and leadership and the emergence of three inductive codes: Engineering Work, Societal Improvement, and Personal Characteristics. We close the paper with a few words on future work.