The purpose of this study is to explore the unique learning experiences that occur during an internship and, in particular, cooperative and traditional internships. The cooperative internship is defined in this thesis as a learning community that serves real clients, achieves real deadlines, and completes real projects in an academic setting, offering direct support for students who participate. The traditional internship, for specific use in this study, is defined as on-the-job practical experience and/or training. The hypothesis being tested is: Students who participate in a cooperative internship will acquire different soft skills than subjects who participate in a traditional internship program. The design of this study includes a voluntary video-recorded questionnaire and qualitative coding of the responses given by subjects being interviewed. All interviews conducted were coded for expressions of professional and personal development, derived from the subjects’ own articulated experiences. Open-ended responses were codified utilizing the Seven Soft Skill Clusters from the Comparative Analysis of Soft Skills (Crawford, et al., 2011) as framework for codification. Responses were analyzed to compare any expressions of advantages and personal development between students with cooperative experience and students with traditional internship experience. Findings suggest cooperative and traditional internship experiences yield different acquired soft skills.
Read
