Asking Culturally Neutral Questions in Engineering

Assessment problems can arise in classes containing students from a variety of cultures with different experiences, attitudes and expectations of education, and often a very different range of relevant engineering experiences. It is possible inadvertently to set assessment questions or tasks which require responses of a type which are unfamiliar or antipathetic to the student, which use vocabulary which is not understood in a sufficiently sophisticated way or which implicitly require a set of experiences or knowledge which not every student possesses. There is very little literature on this topic relating to engineering students. In this paper I cite several examples of culturally loaded questions and suggest that all engineering assessments should be scrutinised from the cultural perspective.

2nd International CDIO Conference, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden, 13 – 14 June 2006