Graduate Attributes and Threshold Concepts: Are We Measuring What’s Important?

A great deal of work has been done within the engineering community to identify the threshold concepts that students must master in order to transform from novice to practitioner. At the same time, engineering regulatory bodies have established a set of graduate attributes that help ensure graduating engineers are prepared to practice professional engineering. Students and recent graduates have identified that one area in which they felt lacking in skills and confidence was solving the complex and multi-faceted problems encountered in the engineering work place. This seems to indicate that students have not fully mastered one or more discipline-specific threshold concepts. This paper presents a framework engineering educators can use to identify, map, and monitor those