2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There have been increased calls to include sociotechnical thinking–grappling with issues of power, history, and culture–throughout the undergraduate engineering curriculum. One way this more expansive framing of engineering has been integrated into engineering courses is through in-class discussions. There is a need to understand what students are attending to in these conversations. In particular, we are interested in how students frame and justify their arguments in small-group discussions.

This study is part of an NSF-funded research project to implement and study integrating sociotechnical components throughout a first-year computing for engineers course. In one iteration of the revised course, each week students read a news article on a current example of the uneven impacts of technology, then engaged in in-class small-group discussions. In this study, we analyze students’ discourse to answer the research questions: What arguments do students use to argue against the use of a technology? How do these arguments relate to common narratives about technology?

In this qualitative case study, we analyzed videorecordings of the small group discussions of two focus groups discussing the use of AI in hiring. We looked closely at the justifications students gave for their stated positions and how they relate to the common narratives of technocracy, free market idealism, technological neutrality, and technological determinism.

We found all students in both groups rejected these common narratives. We saw students argue that (1) AI technology does not solve the hiring problem well, (2) it is important to regulate AI, (3) using AI for hiring will stagnate diversity, and (4) using AI for hiring unfairly privileges some groups of people over others. While students in both groups rejected the common narratives, only one group explicitly centered those who are harmed and how this harm would likely occur, and this group did so consistently. The other group managed to consistently reject the narratives using vague, safe language and never explicitly mentioned who is harmed by the technology. As a result, only one group’s discussion was clearly centered on justice concerns.

These results have implications for how to scaffold small group sociotechnical discussions, what instructors should attend to during these discussions, and how to support students to orient toward systemic impacts and sustain a focus on justice.