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Wed, 21 Feb 2018 16:53:55 +0000

Kulturel-Konak and Konak honored with ASEE Best Paper Award admin Wed, 02/21/2018 - 11:53
Sadan Kulturel-Konak
Credit: Penn State Expand February 21, 2018
READING, Pa. — Two Penn State Berks faculty members were recently honored by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). Their paper titled, "Assessment of Progressive Learning of Ethics in Engineering Students Based on the Model of Domain Learning," co-authored by Sadan Kulturel-Konak and Abdullah Konak, among others, was recognized as the ASEE Best Zone I Paper for 2017. Only four papers receive this prestigious recognition nationally each year; one from each of the four geographic zones of the ASEE. The authors have been invited to present their paper at the ASEE National Conference in Salt Lake City in June.

The paper was co-authored by Ivan Esparragoza, Sadan Kulturel-Konak, Abdullah Konak, Gul Kremer and Kristen Lee, and supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The selection was made among the best section papers from 2017 in Zone I, which includes the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast and St. Lawrence Sections. These sections are comprised of the membership of ASEE in the Northeastern United States and Canada.

Sadan Kulturel-Konak, professor of management information systems, is the principal investigator for the NSF project, which puts forward a novel uniform assessment framework based on the theory of Model of Domain Learning (MDL) to assess student development in various professional skills across multiple disciplines.

According to Kulturel-Konak, the dynamics of a new global economy require new college graduates to have not only excellent technical foundations but also strong professional skills to be successful in their career choices. Therefore, this MDL-based assessment instrument will be used to obtain insight and unanticipated information about the learning process to determine actions for curriculum development and continuous quality improvement in higher education.

This paper presents the results of an assessment instrument designed to evaluate the progressive learning of ethics in the engineering curriculum. The results show that the instrument successfully captures the ethics skill development in engineering education taking into consideration the components and stages of learning described by the MDL framework.

For additional information on this research, contact Kulturel-Konak at 610-396-6137 or via email at SXK70@psu.edu.