Adaptation and validation of the Work Experience Questionnaire for investigating engineering students’ internship experience

Abstract

Background: Given the well‐documented benefits of internship experience to the training of future engineers in the literature, internship courses have become an integral part of the engineering curriculum in many universities around the world. Current evaluation of engineering internship courses in higher education relies mainly on surveys developed independently by the internship coordinator which are seldom validated.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to validate a newly adapted version of the Work Experience Questionnaire (WEQ), which can be used for evaluating engineering students' perception of their internship experience.

Design/Method: The questionnaire was administered to 271 engineering students from one university in Hong Kong. To provide evidence on reliability and validity, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were performed to examine the psychometric properties of the instrument.

Results: Exploratory factor analysis resulted in four factors: clear goals, workplace support, university support, and generic competencies. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the correlated four‐factor model provided an acceptable fit with the data. Cronbach's alpha indicated that the four scales were reliable. The four‐factors are also pragmatic in the engineering context.

Conclusions: This study reviewed and provided reliability and validity evidence of key constructs in the WEQ in a single disciplinary (i.e., engineering) context and also in the Hong Kong context. Use of the questionnaire to evaluate engineering students' internship experience and to investigate the relationship between their perception of the learning environment and their learning outcomes can help to inform the design and implementation of engineering internship program for student learning and quality assurance.