2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 285: Exploring Impacts of Socially Engaged Engineering Training: What Do Students’ Attend to in Scenario-Based Interviews?

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Engineering is inherently a sociotechnical endeavor. However, social aspects of engineering work have historically been framed as outside the purview of engineering practice. Given both the history of exclusion of social considerations and the current impacts of that history, we investigated students’ development of socially engaged engineering skills. The Center for Socially Engaged Design (C-SED) at the University of Michigan developed a Social Engagement Toolkit (SET) to help better prepare students to leverage socially engaged engineering skills. In order to evaluate impacts of the SET training on what students attend to, we studied how students who participated in a course that leveraged SET materials approached engineering problems. We conducted a scenario-based pre-/post-interview exploratory study with five upper-level mechanical engineering students who participated in a capstone course that utilized the SET in its curriculum. In this paper, we present summaries of each participant pre-SET and post-SET interview together as individual cases for a total of five cases. We end by describing how this exploratory study informed iterations of our scenarios and interview protocol.

Authors

Ms. Kelley E Dugan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1859-2230 University of Michigan [biography]

Kelley E. Dugan is an (incoming) Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Her research aims to understand and support complex sociotechnical problem solving in engineering, which can often be framed as engineering design problems. They focus on how social dimensions can be recognized and integrated into problem solving processes by studying student and practicing engineers’ processes with and without problem solving tools. She earned her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The Ohio State University, and they are wrapping up their Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Erika Mosyjowski http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5700-641X University of Michigan [biography]

Erika A. Mosyjowski (she/her/hers) is the Research and Faculty Engagement Manager in the Center for Socially Engaged Design at the University of Michigan. She has a B.A. in Psychology and Sociology from Case Western Reserve University and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Higher Education from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Shanna R. Daly http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4698-2973 University of Michigan [biography]

Shanna Daly is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. She has a B.E. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Dayton and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University.

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