2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This complete research paper will continue the work of Flanagan et al.'s [5] work-in-progress paper that examined how adding empathy into first-year engineering curriculum changed students’ perspectives on the role of an engineer. Engineering design revolves fundamentally around meeting user needs and to offer solutions that meet diverse needs, engineers need to cultivate an understanding of various perspectives. Empathy plays a crucial role in enabling engineers to thoroughly consider the implications of their design decisions on people and employing empathy can effectively address sociocultural and political aspects of designs. This necessitates its inclusion in engineering classrooms. Flanagan et al. found that through the incorporation of empathy into the curriculum students begin to think about who they are solving problems for and their role in communicating with those stakeholders and showed a potential shift in the way that they think about who an engineer is and what an engineer does [5]. This paper will further examine this phenomenon by investigating how empathy modules in a first-year class affect engineering identity. If there is a shift in the role of an engineer that the student is identifying with how does that interact with their interest, performance/competence, and recognition as an engineer? Grounded in the model of empathy in engineering [6] and engineering identity framework this question will be examined using two established quantitative measures, one for each framework [7,8]. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is used to examine any potential direct or indirect relationships between empathy and engineering identity formation using survey data from Fall 2023. Results show a direct relationship between the two constructs with increased strength of relationship from the beginning of the semester compared to the end.