2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This NSF-funded Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project aims to integrate sociotechnical issues in electrical engineering (EE) curricula beginning with the Introduction to Circuits class. To prepare graduates for the workforce, instructors must help students address the sociotechnical nature of engineering. Most engineering instructors have been educated with a deep technical focus, have little experience outside of engineering, and feel ill-equipped to integrate sociotechnical issues. In this project, we aim to make it easier for engineering instructors to include sociotechnical issues in their courses by developing modules (with detailed teaching guides and instructional resources) for the introduction to circuits course.
In year 1, we developed and refined modules on (1) conflict minerals and (2) the circular economy and electric vehicle (EV) batteries. We piloted both modules in one of the principal investigator’s (PI’s) classes at the University of San Diego (USD) a small private institution with about 20 students and one module at the other PI’s large public institution (University of Michigan) with over 150 students. We developed a survey which we administer at the beginning and end of the semester to assess students’ attitudes toward social responsibility and engineering. We will use student feedback to refine the modules and explore the experiences of the engineering instructors and students who engage with them. Further, we will assess the effectiveness of the modules at reinforcing technical content, promoting students’ sense of social responsibility, and disrupting students’ adherence to normative cultural beliefs.
We are recruiting a cohort of EE graduate students to assist in developing additional modules. After pre-piloting each new module at a small private institution and piloting it at a large public research institution, we will scale it to other large circuits courses across the country.
This project will provide a model for developing sociotechnical modules to be used in traditional engineering classes that can be adapted by other instructors. Including such content in a fundamental course like circuits sends a powerful message about what is valued by the field, and that message can have a significant impact on students.