Graduate Education in Construction Management

Construction management has become a vital aspect of the construction process over the years. This paper reviews the Master’s programs in construction engineering and management (CEM) offered by departments of civil engineering in the United States. The findings indicate that only 20% of the American educational institutions, which offer accredited civil engineering programs, offer Master’s programs in CEM. Most of the Master’s programs in CEM constitute an effort to convey information to students on mainly six categories, namely, contract administration, project management, scheduling, equipment management, construction technology, and CEM research. It seems that the Master’s programs in CEM do not differ much from program to program in terms of content. When the trends in course offerings are compared in 1982, 1996, and 2008, there seems to be minimal change except for the number of courses in project management that went up significantly while the number of courses in cost estimating went down. The trends in the remaining courses have been stable. Even though contents and trends in CEM programs appear to be relatively stable, there seems to be some variability in the concentration of the course offerings. Some CEM programs concentrate on some of the categories at the expense of other categories. A close relationship and a sound dialogue between construction educators and the industry are likely to lead to Master’s programs that are in sync with the expectations of the industry.     

Construction Engineering and Management Undergraduate Education

Construction education is not new. It was a part of the practical aspects of many early civil engineering degree programs. As early as the 1920's, specializations in construction engineering were found in a few civil engineering programs, paralleling structural engineering and other areas. However, the gradual need for more specialization than could normally be integrated in the civil engineering degree eventually led to the formation of some construction specialty degree undergraduate programs, particularly after World War II. This paper documents the historical evolution of construction education, promotes construction as a stand-alone professional engineering discipline, provides information for schools that are interested in starting an undergraduate construction engineering and management (CEM) degree program, and discusses the engineering accreditation aspects of the CEM curriculum and the role of the construction industry in the CEM curriculum development.     

Linkages between Construction Engineering Education and Research

The needs of the construction industry require that an appropriate balance be provided between construction engineering topics and management topics in both education and research. Because construction is less mature as a research area compared to other areas in civil engineering, limitations on research funding have made the investigation of construction management topics more feasible in comparison to construction engineering topics. Because faculty members are drawn from the pool of Ph.D. students who have primarily researched management topics, there has been a tendency for them to continue emphasis on management topics in both education and research. Other civil engineering disciplines form their research programs around the needs of design codes and standards’ development, and academic participation is high. Similar efforts exist within construction engineering; however, there is less academic participation. It is suggested that greater effort be invested in the improvement of construction process standards and specifications so that construction engineering research efforts can advance construction process standards and stimulate increased engineering educational exposure. It is also suggested that academics who are interested in construction engineering research should consider participating in the specification improvement processes that occur at the national and state levels. A process for wider participation in construction engineering research and standards development is recommended.     

Current State of Highway Safety Education: Safety Course Offerings in Engineering and Public Health

There is a need to investigate educational offerings in highway safety available through engineering, public health, and injury prevention programs at universities in the United States. A series of surveys was distributed to universities and transportation engineering research centers throughout the United States from March 2004 to March 2005, requesting information about safety course availability and content (e.g., course outline, syllabus, references, and notes). Of 117 engineering programs contacted, 29 safety courses were identified at 25 universities; of 34 public health programs, only seven indicated traffic safety content. A detailed assessment of course content and syllabi revealed that many use reference materials drawn from other areas of transportation (e.g., design and operations); few use educational references reflecting contemporary scientific analyses of safety. Existing course content was compared with safety core competencies developed by a Transportation Research Board Subcommittee to provide an indication of adequacy of course content. The comparison indicated relative strengths in identifying origins and characteristics of crash data and safety management systems, but persistent weaknesses in describing highway safety as a field with underlying scientific principles, which drive how analysis is conducted and decisions are made. The courses also lacked a systemic multidisciplinary perspective, important for success in today’s safety management field. While safety is a primary responsibility of transportation engineers, there is a lack of complete and consistent coverage of this topic at the university level.     

Outcomes Assessment: Sharing Responsibilities

The need for assessment methodologies has become more pressing in recent years, and, as such, the new criteria for accrediting programs in engineering in the United States developed and implemented by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology in Baltimore makes it clear that schools must address these issues. Implementing this methodology will require multiple measures administered over a long period of time and will require engineering faculty and administrators to devote a considerable amount of effort and energy. Because over 50% of undergraduate engineering course work is taken outside of the College of Engineering, it would seem feasible that engineering faculty could establish cooperative efforts with these service course providers to assist the College of Engineering in its efforts to achieve its educational goals and in assessing the outcomes of its various engineering programs. In this paper the rationale for sharing the outcome assessment as well as how the specific sharing can be accomplished is presented.     

Capstone Course in an Integrated Engineering Curriculum

The Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the United States Air Force Academy has developed a capstone senior level integration experience that blends technical aspects of an engineering design with construction and realistic issues of modern society. Technical designs accomplished by the students, prior to taking the capstone course, form the technical basis of the capstone design experience. The students review the technical design and prepare the project for construction through incorporating engineering standards and considering realistic issues. Issues considered include economy, constructability, and environmental aspects, as well as ethical, health and safety constraints. The students prepare a final design report and make an oral presentation to an interdisciplinary panel of engineering faculty. This capstone course is the culmination of a total integration experience, which includes a hands-on field engineering course, and two years of a rigorous engineering design curriculum.     

Development of New Faculty: Summary of the NSF-CMS WEE Workshop

The National Science Foundation-Civil and Mechanical Systems (NSF-CMS) Workshop on the Advancement and Retention of Underrepresented and Minority Engineering Educators (WEE) 2003 brought together approximately 75 future, new, and seasoned professors from universities all over the United States. The NSF workshop is intended to provide valuable information to new or prospective underrepresented and minority faculty to assist them with the start of their academic careers. However, the information provided in the workshop is universally applicable to all new engineering professors, who aspire to develop comprehensive research, teaching, and service programs. This paper provides a highlight of the workshop and summarizes some of the key information presented. Topics such as funding strategies, proposal writing, and advice for the new tenure track faculty member are given. Where appropriate, we have included supplemental information from the literature that supports or expands on topics discussed at the workshop.     

Case management: an American's observations of community care in Britain

The United States faces a rapidly growing aging population, government reforms, and policy shifts to give primary responsibility to the states for programs of community-based care for the elderly. At the same time, increasing concern is being given to the more effective use of home and community-based services, and particularly what role case management might play. Given these changes, much may be learned from the 1993 reforms to the British system of community care, which made case management the cornerstone of the system and gave primary responsibility for community care programs to local social service departments. This examination of the programs in Britain, conducted largely through site visits and personal interviews with social service staff, describes the successes and shortcomings of the implementation of the community care reforms with recommendations for program development in the United States.     

Construction Management Program

The typical limitations of the existing construction management programs are the lack of an integrated approach to managerial decisions in real life construction environment, not enough emphasis on engineering design, construction methods and communication skills, and poor coordination between the undergraduate and the graduate studies. An effective construction management program should. integrate teaching on undergraduate and graduate levels and research. On the undergraduate level it should provide the students with a good insight into all managerial tasks in civil engineering projects. On the graduate level it should allow specialization in the various areas of interest both to the practicing engineers and also to students who wish to pursue an academic career. The program should strongly interact with research and engineering practice.     

Action Research as a Proactive Research Method for Construction Engineering and Management

Academic research in applied disciplines such as construction engineering and management (CEM) has the dual mission of simultaneously contributing to the solution of practical problems and creating theoretical and conceptual knowledge. To do so, appropriate research approaches are needed. However, extant literature in the field has paid little attention to this issue and research methods used have been almost entirely either quantitative surveys or case studies. In this paper, action research (AR) is proposed as an answer to this knowledge gap. AR aims at building and testing theory within the context of solving an immediate practical problem in a real setting. The paper describes the underlying philosophy and application procedure of AR and highlights its strengths and weaknesses. Then, the applicability of the method to CEM is illustrated through a case study of improving access to information to support planning and decision making in a construction owner organization through designing and implementing a data warehouse. The findings indicate that AR is a reliable, structured, and rigorous research approach that is very useful for conducting applied research in construction and enabling academia to influence and improve construction industry practices. It can also effectively help to improve collaboration between academic researchers and industry practitioners in research and development projects.     

Educational Partnership to Establish Engineering/Construction Management Graduate Programs in Algeria

This paper describes a partnership between the University of Missouri–Rolla and the Université Abou-Bekr Belka?d de Tlemcen in Algeria in order to support the development of programs of instruction and faculty training in Algeria in the areas of engineering and construction management in order to create a self-sustaining educational infrastructure in Algeria. Specifically, the partnership aims to provide educational and technical assistance to Algeria in order for them to develop: (1) new graduate programs in engineering and construction management and (2) modern teaching methodologies including Internet and distance learning. Objectives of the partnership were to provide engineering and construction management skills and expertise in order to achieve international standards in the management area. The desired impact is summarized in terms of the ability to identify operations problems and implement solutions for improved strategic competitiveness, make sound decisions, plan, and control the key resources of an organization—money and people, critically analyze, evaluate, improve, or adapt existing technical and managerial systems, design and develop new technical and managerial systems, and coordinate different projects with a better harmony and cost effectiveness. The long-term expected outcomes of the partnership are Algerian faculty with strong backgrounds in engineering and construction management, a self-sustained learning environment for Algerian institutions, including engineering management and construction management graduate programs, continuing education, and short courses, and Internet-based multimedia teaching material for collaboration between the Algerian institutions and local industry.     

Experiences of ethnic minority faculty employed in predominantly white schools of nursing

This qualitative study describes the bicultural experience of ten ethnic minority faculty employed in predominately white baccalaureate and higher degree nursing programs in the Southeastern section of the United States. Seven themes emerged from the data: (a) appraising, (b) proving, (c) fitting-in, (d) defending, (e) distancing, (f) being invisible, and (g) mentoring to describe their experience. Results also provided support for the authors' generated Bicultural Systems Model which evaluates why and to what extent a particular transaction or series of transactions between the person and the environment is perceived as stressful. The general perception among participants was that they were not fully accepted in the academic setting of predominately white nursing programs. As a result, some faculty were expending energy trying to convince others of their legitimacy; while others were choosing to distance themselves from the academic setting and white colleagues. This study indicates a need for dialogue between white and ethnic minority faculty to facilitate adoption of strategies that reduce the negative effects of the bicultural phenomenon.     

Increasing Engineers’ Role in Construction Safety: Opportunities and Barriers

A number of factors suggest engineering and construction professionals should discuss increasing designers’ role in construction safety. Design civil engineers could contribute to construction worker safety by performing five tasks differently than current custom and practice: reviewing their designs, creating design documents, assisting the owner in procuring construction, reviewing submittals, and inspecting work in progress. However, four sets of major barriers would prevent designers from increasing worker safety through these tasks: lack of safety expertise, lack of understanding of construction processes, typical contract terms, and professional fees. Potential ways for reducing these barriers are suggested. The United Kingdom regulations requiring engineers to design for safety are summarized, but it is concluded that similar legislation in the United States would not be appropriate.     

An Analysis of School Psychology Faculty by Graduating University.

Shortages of school psychologists have been documented for many years with this deficiency extending not just to practitioners but to trainers as well. This article presents the results of a search to identify individuals employed in academic institutions and their graduating universities. Using an Internet search and mailings to doctoral degree-granting school psychology programs, 633 individuals were identified as having graduated from a school psychology program in the United States or Canada and being currently employed full-time in a faculty position in an institute of higher education. When graduating university was examined, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Texas at Austin were consistently the highest rated programs in terms of producing school psychology academics. Other findings indicated that APA-accredited programs produced the majority of individuals in academic positions and that women have outnumbered men in entering the professorate every year since 1987. Women also currently comprise 51% of the school psychology professorate. While these data should not be considered a measure of program quality, they do provide an objective rating of program success in preparing students for careers in academia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attitudes toward Productivity Pay Programs

Impressive results have been achieved by implementing financial incentive programs in construction in several foreign countries and in numerous other industries in the United States. This paper identifies the historical causes for the scarcity of such programs in the U.S. construction industry, highlights current obstacles to their introduction, and recommends steps to avoid or overcome them, so as to open the way to future introduction of incentive programs. The study employs the Delphi technique and concludes that the near absence of pay programs in the construction industry in the U.S. can be attributed to: (1) Tradition and conservatism of the industry; (2) union opposition; and (3) the nature of the work. The panel predicted significant differences between the overall attitudes of the various parties toward productivity pay programs; the contractors and the owners will be supportive, the employees somewhat supportive, the government neutral, and the union opposed.     

Predicting student satisfaction in baccalaureate nursing programs: testing a causal model

The purpose of this study was to test a causal model for predicting the overall satisfaction of senior students with their baccalaureate nursing programs. The proposed model was primarily a sociological impact model based upon Tinto's (1975) student integration theory for predicting student departure, and Pascarella's (1985) causal model for predicting student outcomes. To test the model, a sample of 195 senior female students from five baccalaureate nursing programs in the southwestern United States was selected for step-wise regression studies and path analysis. Testing the causal model, the students' integration into the academic and social systems of their nursing programs directly explained 42% of the variance for predicting overall satisfaction. The best predictors of overall satisfaction were the students' 1) academic development, 2) satisfaction with facilities and services, 3) satisfaction with the faculty, and 4) social interaction with peers.     

Integrating Management Breadth in Civil Engineering Education

At the beginning of the 21st century, there is a wider awareness that the civil engineering industry has become a global industry. The rapid increase in foreign ownership of firms in the United States along with the globalization of economic markets is reminding professionals that they must be aware of global events before they impact local operating conditions. In response to these developments, university programs must begin to broaden their focus to include subjects that address new economy realities. Specifically, the time to begin exposing students to management topics such as entrepreneurship, financial management, and global economics has arrived. If the civil engineering industry is going to evolve into a new economy business, it will require individuals who are as comfortable with the financial and technological components of the business as they are with design or construction fundamentals.     

Web-Based Decision Support Systems: Case Study inProject Delivery

The decentralized nature of the construction industry contributes to difficulties in the implementation and dissemination of project management-based decision tools. The majority of decision support systems (DSS) are contained in-house with private developers and users, or on researchers stand-alone computers and academic journals. Current World Wide Web technologies provide the appropriate means for large-scale implementation and continued development of DSS for the architectural, engineering, and construction community. This paper documents a DSS developed specifically for design∕build project selection among United States public sector agencies. The system, the Design∕Build Selector (DBS), is Web enabled, allowing for easy access and large-scale dissemination. Design∕build project procurement is rapidly expanding throughout public sector agencies in the United States construction industry. As public agencies turn to design∕build, appropriate project selection is a primary consideration affecting successful delivery. Prior to the implementation of DBS, there was no systematic or formalized method for selecting projects appropriate for design∕build. Since 1997, the Web site that houses the DBS has been visited by over 4,000 people, and the DBS tool has been used on 102 projects representing over $4.8 billion in construction. This paper reports on the application and potential for Web-based DSS in civil engineering. The architecture of the program, data collection, model weighting, and output interface are explained.     

Becoming a clinical psychologist in the United Kingdom.

The process by which one becomes a qualified clinical psychologist in the United Kingdom (U.K.) is described so that American (United States) clinical psychologists visiting the U.K. may better understand the context in which their British counterparts work. The process begins with the admissions criteria of training programs and ends with one's acceptance as a fully qualified, independent clinical psychologist. Educational and health care issues are described as factors relevant in shaping the structure of clinical psychology programs. Advantages and disadvantages of the British system are discussed in the light of continuing political changes, and some suggestions for improvements are made. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Graduate student success: Sex or situation?

Comments on N. Hirschberg and S. Itkin's (see record 1979-27229-001) study and offers some additional information regarding potential causes of differential rates of attrition from graduate programs by sex. Aspects of the departmental environment into which highly qualified applicants are placed and public and private statements of discouragement of female students by faculty are suggested as contributing factors unrelated to the female students' achievement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)