Assessing and Facilitating Students' Intercultural Competency Development to Prepare them for Interdisciplinary Global Engagement

To address the unprecedented challenges that our global society faces, the next generation of scientists and engineers must learn to collaborate and navigate across diverse partnerships to solve problems with an understanding of the complex ways in which technical and social aspects are intertwined. Global education typically involves US students traveling to foreign countries and engaging in community service projects to obtain these perspectives. The global pandemic made international travel impossible, and even post-COVID there are sometimes barriers to students being able to travel abroad. In response, two OSU courses were redesigned by integrating intercultural learning activities, purposefully designed intercultural interactions and collaborations, and student reflections with the more discipline-specific course content. This work assesses these courses’ effects on students’ intercultural competency development using Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) pre- and post- testing, as well as focus groups, surveys, and narrative analysis. Findings from this work indicate that students were able to simultaneously develop intercultural competence and academic focused skill sets, sometimes to a greater extent than gains in intercultural competence observed in more traditional study abroad international trips. This session will highlight some of the intercultural learning activities, the Intercultural Development Inventory assessment tool, and study outcomes. Participants will explore how some of these techniques could be incorporated into their own courses and workshops to help learners develop their ability to work more effectively in intercultural settings.