PhD Thesis Proposal: Emily Monroe

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"From Identity to Commitment: Developing and Validating the Professional Engineering Commitments Scale (PECS) for Cyber- and AI-Ready Practice"

Abstract

Professional licensure asks engineers to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public. Engineering education has strong tools to measure what students can do and how they identify as engineers, but it has no validated instrument for the normative professional commitment that licensure embodies: the felt obligation to protect the public even when doing so is costly. This dissertation develops and validates the Professional Engineering Commitments Scale (PECS), a measure grounded in Meyer and Allen's conception of normative commitment, to address that gap.

PECS measures four constructs: Public Welfare, Internalized Values, Licensure Commitment, and AI Verification and Accountability, the last capturing the engineer's responsibility to verify the work of increasingly capable AI systems and to remain the accountable human in the loop. Items were generated through a theory-, practice-, and standards-grounded pipeline and refined using semantic network analysis. A panel of practicing and academic experts then reviewed the pool, yielding strong content validity (S-CVI/Ave = 0.951) and a retained 66-item exploratory pool.

The proposed work tests the scale's structure and meaning. Exploratory factor analysis will examine dimensionality, followed by confirmatory factor analysis and tests of reliability and measurement invariance over the following year. The capstone design experience, studied as a site of cognitive apprenticeship and professional formation, provides the setting for examining whether and how commitment forms.

Finally, the dissertation positions commitment as a practically useful variable. By linking PECS scores to workforce questions in AI-integrated, cyber-resilient practice, it asks how a validated measure of professional commitment might inform where and how the next generation of engineers is developed and directed. The contribution is a theoretically grounded, empirically validated instrument that lets the field measure a commitment it has long valued but never directly assessed, along with a demonstration of why that measurement matters for public welfare.

Thesis Committee

• Solomon Diamond (Chair)
• Geoffrey Parker
• Eugene Santos Jr.
• Idalis Villanueva Alarcón (Department of Engineering Education, University of Florida)

Contact

For more information, contact Thayer Registrar at thayer.registrar@dartmouth.edu .