2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Traditional disciplinary silos have separated engineering and the humanities, creating gaps in engineering students’ skills. Technical knowledge and aptitude have long been a mainstay in engineering education, whereas critical thinking, empathy, and ethical reasoning have been key in the humanities. In an ever-complex and interrelated world, society's grand challenges call for problem-solving that provides technical innovations while considering and understanding the people involved and affected by that innovation. A holistic outlook, combining engineering with the humanities may be an avenue to enrich the technical skills of engineering students while developing their empathetic skills. Based on this idea, a collaboration between Texas Tech University (TTU) and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) has been made to analyze problem-solving assignments in interdisciplinary team-taught (ITT) courses and regular engineering courses. The ITT courses are called humanities-driven science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (HDSTEM) because they take the structure and form of a humanities course while introducing and discussing STEM problem-solving. Early-in- and late-in-semester surveys for empathy and critical thinking were given for all courses in this study. Further, discourse analysis of problem-solving assignments from HDSTEM and engineering courses was performed. A commonly used rubric for empathy was used in conjunction with this analysis to gauge and baseline students' empathetic dispositions. Results from surveys show no statistically significant difference in empathy or critical thinking levels among students in all treatments, which is understandable based on the limited number of surveys collected. Preliminary results from discourse analysis indicate improved empathetic dispositions are greater in problem-solving assignments in HDSTEM courses regardless of group (i.e., institution). Further, with the curricular treatment of HDSTEM, specifically asking students to empathize before their problem-solving assignment can improve the empathetic dispositions of students. This work is based on work from an NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) grant.