IGE: Developing Reflective Engineers

Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX

Investigators

Abstract

While engineering provides basic infrastructure and is a major source of technological innovations, its work is embedded in complex social, cultural, and environmental contexts. Graduate education in engineering typically produces engineers who are highly competent technicians, but who may lack the ability to understand and successfully navigate those contexts. Important skills that may help engineers bring contextual perspectives into their problem solving include the ability to integrate across disciplines, to devise solutions to poorly-defined challenges, and to recognize and address broader societal and global issues. This National Science Foundation Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) award to Texas Tech University will test an approach designed to change the way graduate students in engineering conceptualize and reason about their work to better prepare them for real-world complexity. The project will use innovative methods, informed by arts and humanities education and grounded in the learning sciences, to help students become more reflective thinkers who have greater awareness of the complex, broader contexts of their work. The project will employ arts- and humanities-informed learning activities within the engineering curriculum to help students better understand the social and community aspects of engineering by becoming more reflective thinkers. The curriculum will include activities such as visual thinking strategies to develop observational skills, computer-simulated ethical/moral dilemmas to prepare for real world complexity, and team projects to practice reflective engineering. The purpose of these techniques is to enhance reflective reasoning and connect that reasoning to engineering. This project will assess how the curriculum changes the student's ability to think reflectively, how the curriculum changes the way the student thinks about the role of engineers within a societal context, and what factors limit or enhance the ability of the student to benefit from the curriculum. A mixed-methods approach will be used to assess the effectiveness of the intervention including surveys, formative peer assessment, interviews, narrative inquiry, and textual analysis. The teaching and learning techniques that are the most effective in building reflective reasoning will be identified and refined and the results will be used to strengthen and broaden the impact of the curriculum. Publications and workshops conducted for other faculty and teaching-assistants will be used to disseminate the key findings from the project and aid translation of the research to other settings and institutions. The ultimate goal of the research project is to create an impactful, evidence-based curriculum that educates future engineers who are committed to serving the public not only with technical engineering skills but with a mindfulness of the complex social, cultural, and environmental contexts impacting their work. The Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) program is focused on research in graduate education. The goals of IGE are to pilot, test and validate innovative approaches to graduate education and to generate the knowledge required to move these approaches into the broader community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.