Participation of Students in Multinational Projects - a Pre/Post Comparison of Their Motivation Based on Gender and Geographic Location

Multinational collaborations are a common practice in industry nowadays. This practice is very common in engineering projects, with collaboration activities taking place globally. Academic institutions need to make their students aware of these scenarios by implementing activities that expose their students to such environments. Institutions from six different countries in the Americas and Italy have conducted an educational experience in the context of a collaborative engineering design project. The collaboration defines multinational teams that work on a project for several weeks. The objective of this study is to determine and compare the level of motivation that students report before and after their participation in the collaboration. The level of motivation is based on their self-reported interest and perception of value, two of the constructs collected with a survey based on the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI). Collected data is analyzed statistically based on gender and geographic location. The expectation is to have high levels of motivation before and after their participation in the multinational design project, thus implying interest and satisfaction with the activity. Results indicate that students have high level of motivation before participation, independent of the two factors studied. There is a reduction in the level of motivation after participation, with some variations based on gender and location. Discussion of these results is provided.