Using Vignettes to Categorize Behaviors That Students Associate with Dispositions

This full research paper contributes to current work on fostering professional dispositions in computing and engineering education by identifying the categories of behaviors that students associate with dispositions while doing course work. Professional dispositions, demonstrated through desirable behaviors in the workplace, such as being persistent or self-directed, are explicitly sought by employers. Fostering dispositions among students has been identified in various curricular recommendations as an important goal. In prior work, the authors used reflection exercises, in which students were presented with the definition of a disposition and asked to answer an open-ended reflection prompt on how they applied the disposition in their own work. Thematic analysis of student responses to reflection exercises resulted in categories of behaviors that students associated with dispositions. In the work discussed in this paper, the authors used vignette exercises to collect and analyze similar data and gain further insight into behavioral categories and students' perceptions of dispositions. Vignettes include short scenarios that demonstrate the application of dispositions in real life. A vignette exercise involves students reading a vignette scenario, identifying the disposition demonstrated by the scenario, and answering the same open-ended reflection prompt as in the reflection exercises from the earlier studies. The research question for this study is: Which behavioral categories obtained from analyzing student responses to reflection exercises were confirmed using vignette exercises (and which were not confirmed), and which behavioral categories were refined? To answer this question, researchers from four different institutions of higher education collected data in multiple courses over two semesters. The student open-ended responses to vignettes were thematically analyzed to identify behavioral categories for four dispositions: collaborative, meticulous, persistent and self-directed. The ultimate goal of this work is to create classroom inter-ventions and learning activities that foster dispositions among students based on behavioral categories. This study supports this goal in two ways. It provides another iteration of behavioral category analysis and introduces vignettes to encourage students to reflect candidly and communicate clearly how they apply dispositions in terms of behaviors. The study results and their implications for fostering dispositions in a classroom setting are presented and discussed.