2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: Developing Rasch/Guttman Scenario Scales towards an Empathy in Design Instrument

Presented at ERM WIP I: Methodological Applications in the Disciplines

This work-in-progress (WIP) paper presents initial work to develop a progressive scenario-based instrument to measure empathy in an engineering design context. This work leverages the Rasch/Guttman Scenario (RGS) Scale Methodology as an approach to develop scenario items to understand hierarchically progressive constructs. While traditional Likert-type scales are useful for understanding the intensity of constructs, they are not ideal for investigating progressive or hierarchical phenomena and often use short and narrowly focused items to create multi-item scales and reduce measurement error. Scenario scales use richer hypothetical situations to assess respondents’ attitudes and behaviors, including those that embed progress and hierarchy relationships too complex for Likert-type scales.

Empathy is increasingly recognized as an important part of engineering education, particularly in design, as it can enable one to effectively meet user needs and can provide the “spark of human concern” for users. Previous work developed a Likert-type instrument to explore empathy in design but found that while the items could measure empathy type in a design context, they lacked reliability in assessing empathy in different design phases. To better capture how empathy manifests across progressive engineering design phases, the RGS methodology provides a way to capture hierarchical levels of empathy that span dimensions of motivation, orientation, and intensity. RGS combines Facet Theory, which is a systematic approach to map and integrate theory and research design decisions to create scenarios that engage a range of possible facets (i.e., empathy type and design phase) and intensities. These scenarios can be tested with Rasch measurement modeling to understand how the intended measures capture the hierarchical nature of the phenomenon.

This paper presents the completion of the first three steps of a seven-step scenario development process which include: 1) defining the constructs, 2) determining facets and generating descriptions, and 3) determining facet levels and generating descriptions. This work emphasizes the crafting of facet-level descriptions that prepare the team for future steps in creating sets of five to seven scenarios for each of four constructs reflecting empathy in a step of the design process.

Authors

Dr. Kelsey Scalaro Cornell University [biography]

Kelsey is a postdoctoral scholar with the STRIDE group at Cornell University. She recently graduated with PhD in Engineering Education from the University of Nevada, Reno. She has a BS and MS in mechanical engineering and worked in the aerospace industry for four years before returning to academia to complete her doctoral degree. Her research focuses on undergraduate engineering identity and is interested in exploring how it can be equitably supported through pedagogical practices.
Dr. Allison Godwin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0741-3356 Cornell University [biography]

Allison Godwin, Ph.D. is the Dr. G. Stephen Irwin '67, '68 Professor in Engineering Education Research (Associate Professor) in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. She is also the Associate Director of the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility and a McCormick Teaching Excellence Institute Research Fellow. Her research focuses on how identity, among other affective factors, influences diverse groups of students to choose engineering and persist in engineering. She also studies how different experiences within the practice and culture of engineering foster or hinder belonging, motivation, and identity development. Dr. Godwin graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. in Engineering and Science Education. Her research earned her a National Science Foundation CAREER Award focused on characterizing latent diversity, which includes diverse attitudes, mindsets, and approaches to learning to understand engineering students’ identity development. She has won several awards for her research including the 2021 Chemical Engineering Education William H. Corcoran Award, 2022 American Educational Research Association Education in the Professions (Division I) 2021-2022 Outstanding Research Publication Award, and the 2023 AIChE Excellence in Engineering Education Research Award.
Dr. Justin L Hess http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1210-9535 Purdue University at West Lafayette (PWL) (COE) [biography]

Dr. Justin L Hess is an assistant professor in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. Dr. Hess's research interests include exploring empathy's functional role in engineering and design; advancing the state of the art of engineering.
Dr. Nicholas D. Fila Iowa State University of Science and Technology [biography]

Nicholas D. Fila is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University. His research interests include empathy, ethics, design thinking, and course design.
Dr. Corey T Schimpf http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-2706-3282 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Corey Schimpf is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education at University at Buffalo. He is the Past Division Chair for the Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) for the American Society of Engineering Education. His research interests include engineering and human-centered design, advancing research methods, and technology innovations to support learning in complex domains. He has a PhD from Purdue University in Engineering Education.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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