The patterns of Malaysian undergraduate engineering students' intellectual development

Abstract

Knowing students’ intellectual development is important to improve the quality of engineering education. Before this, most studies explored intellectual development in the context of western countries. This study explores the patterns of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) undergraduate engineering students’ intellectual development. The respondents were from two engineering faculties across different academic years. The intellectual development theory was based on ‘Perry’s Model of Intellectual and Ethical Development in College Year: A Scheme’, which described intellectual development of students in higher education institution. The adapted Perry Developmental Questionnaire (El-Farargy, 2010) was used to assess students’ intellectual development levels based on Perry model which contains 18 items. From the model, the questionnaire consists the constructs such as teaching method, learning influences, students perceptions, and curriculum structure. Therefore the model determined these constructs influence students’ intellectual development. A total number of 515 engineering undergraduates were selected from two engineering faculties across different academic years. The objective of this study was to capture the patterns of intellectual development levels (dualistic, multiplicity, commitment in relativism) among Malaysian undergraduate engineering students in relation to their perceptions of learning experiences in different engineering faculties. The analyses of the data showed that there was a significant difference between the patterns of students’ intellectual development between dualistic, and multiplist level among first year and third year undergraduates in engineering faculties. There was also significant difference between genders in the patterns of students’ intellectual development levels (dualistic, multiplicity, commitment in relativism) in different engineering faculties. The result showed that women have higher intellectual development than men. It can be concluded that the difference in intellectual development between genders found in this study is the opposite of those proposed by Perry.