2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Empathy is a phenomenon comprising affective processes and cognitive experiences. Empathy is a vital trait for engineers, facilitating a nuanced understanding of complex global challenges by integrating diverse stakeholder perspectives. How to best develop undergraduate engineering students’ empathy over their coursework remains a focused area of study. This study examines the effects of an interdisciplinary service-learning engineering design course, “Entrepreneurial Engineering Design Studio,” in fostering empathy among engineering sophomore-senior level undergraduates at a private technological university. The course integrates design thinking, service learning, and interdisciplinary collaboration, encouraging students to identify design opportunities and engage with customers to foster end-user empathy. A key feature of the course is a service-learning component executed in partnership with local non-profit organizations aiding individuals with disabilities. Before customer interactions, students participate in an accessibility simulation activity to better comprehend the daily experiences of individuals with disabilities, thereby fostering empathy in design.
Amidst the pandemic, the shift to remote interactions offered a distinctive lens to evaluate
empathy development in three cohorts of students (N = 118) who completed the 40-item
Empathy Quotient (EQ) self-report questionnaire pre- and post-course. Results compare EQ
scores from students who received virtual service-learning experiences (cohorts 1 and 2) versus students who received in-person service-learning experiences (cohort 3).
Results at pre-course found female engineering students had higher EQ compared to males,
seniors had higher EQ compared to juniors and sophomores, and biomedical engineering
students had higher EQ compared to civil engineering, electrical engineering, industrial
engineering, and mechanical engineering students. Results of repeated measures ANOVA found a general increase in EQ across Time (Pre and Post) for sophomores and juniors in cohort 3.
To further cultivate empathy among engineering students, we recommended integrating similar interdisciplinary, service-learning experiences throughout their education. Such initiatives should not only occur at specific academic levels but be embedded across the curriculum to ensure a consistent development of empathetic skills, essential for addressing complex global challenges. We also suggest future research investigating empathy in engineering students utilize using other measures of empathy is necessary to differentiate cognitive processes from affective experiences.