2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Compassion plays a crucial role in the development of ethical engineers and the engineering design process, as it fosters a commitment to creating solutions that prioritize the dignity, empowerment, and sense of security of individuals and society as a whole [1]. Sprecher and Ferh [2] describe compassion as a cognitive, affective, and behavioral process of recognizing self and others' suffering and feeling motivated to alleviate suffering. In other words, compassion is more than sympathy or empathy and has two components: engagement and action.

However, compassion may be overlooked in engineering ethics education because it is seen as personal rather than professional. This perception is related to the traditional idea that engineers should avoid emotional aspects of design to develop the most technically effective solutions to problems. This culture of emotional disengagement can inadvertently deter students from exploring and expanding their capacity for compassion. Avoiding compassion may reduce the capacity to consider relevant ethical dimensions of a given design decision thoroughly. In that order of ideas, there needs to be more methods and tools to understand the extent to which engineering students are inclined to engage in compassionate behaviors towards themselves and others.

This poster presents the early stages of a study that aims to validate the Compassionate Engagement and Action Scales developed by Gilbert et al. [3] for the context of engineering education so that compassion in engineering can be quantified and advocated for in a language that is often most relatable to STEM educators. The first step in this study consisted of a literature review of the psychometric validity and reliability evidence and the underlying construct definition to understand the strengths and scope of the instrument. Second, we followed an assessment through experts' judgment who scored the phrasing and adequacy for context and population, according to Jonsson and Svingb [4]. The final step was consolidating the findings in future strategies for the data collection and new research ideas. This adaptation is essential to ensure the instrument is meaningful to engineering students and accurately measure their compassionate engagement and actions.

The validation of this survey will facilitate new research paths in engineering education, enabling a better understanding of the factors that influence compassionate behaviors and how they can be encouraged. This study recognizes the importance of compassion in engineering education and aims to provide a quantifiable framework for assessing compassionate engagement and actions among engineering students. This research seeks to bridge the gap between traditional engineering values and the need for a more caring, aware, and engaged engineering community by adapting the Compassionate Engagement and Action Scales to the engineering context. The results may facilitate new research pathways within engineering education (i.e., What factors influence compassionate behaviors, and how can they be encouraged?). Ultimately, the study advocates for a broader approach to engineering ethics that embraces compassionate values in the conception, design, and implementation of engineering projects.