2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Equity has been newly introduced as outcomes that needs to be addressed and assessed in undergraduate engineering programs in North America. In Canada, the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board has been emphasizing that equity and ethics be embedded in the curriculum through their accreditation visits. This required several programs within our institution to work on methods that can be included to make students more aware of equity issues and assess their understanding on the above subjects.

This paper discusses how courses were changed to include equity as part of the curriculum. Equity discussions were focused through the introduction of universal design as applied in building design- making students experience first-hand what the implications of design choices are on a diverse (age, physical / cognitive ability, race, gender) user group. Three different first year engineering groups were assessed in their knowledge of equity. Group 1 was the group that were prompted with a presentation in class about the different aspects of requirements for building design to address mobility issues followed by an audio recording prompting the students to do a tour on campus and experience first-hand these effects. The second group has done a campus tour without the audio and have been exposed to only the presentation in class. The third group is the control group who has only done the campus tour with no prompts and did not have the presentation. All three groups were assessed later in their knowledge of equity issues in building designs. This paper will share these findings and the details of what the students were exposed to in the three different groups. It also discusses recommendations for future changes that could be done to better include equity discussions and assessments in the curriculum. The paper also states how this could be modified for any undergraduate program.