Introducing Cognitive Diversity to Purdue Students

Purdue students have a difficult time with team assignments. Too often, unproductive members of the team drag down productivity and increase the frustration of other members. Until now, Purdue faculty have not had a systematic approach to providing students with the skills to manage complex collaborations. The AEM-Cube(TM) – developed by our European colleagues at Human Insight – is an assessment of those cognitive preferences. Individuals taking the assessment will learn about how they can best contribute to a team; even better is a whole team taking the assessment and adjusting their assignments and self-management accordingly. Struggling teams will understand why they’ve gone off the rails, while already-strong teams will understand what they need to do to reach their most ambitious goals.

We are now working on plans to expand the application of AEM-Cube to Purdue undergraduates. In the Fall, we will be providing the assessment to 400 undergraduate engineering students. We are working on a like number of undergraduate business students. In addition, we are launching a research project to explore what we are finding about the cognitive differences between engineering and business students.