2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper is submitted under the category ‘Intersection of Design and “X” Research Papers’. In our case, “X” is values-based outcomes, which includes Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Social Justice outcomes.

The engineering profession has a position of significant power and privilege in society, exercised by allocating resources, opportunities, risks, and harms to different social groups. The final year design course is perhaps the most common capstone experience in the Canadian and American engineering curriculums and is often a rich source of data for accreditation related graduate attribute information. So, it would be reasonable to expect outcomes related to societal considerations and needs to be prevalent in those capstones. Unfortunately, the engineering design capstone tends to focus on a culmination of technical skills instead of values (Vale et. al. 2020). This determination is consistent with Cech’s (2014) findings regarding the culture of disengagement in engineering education, which speaks to three mindsets that limit engineer’s ability to adequately serve the most vulnerable members of society: the socio-technical divide, depoliticization, and meritocracy.

The mindsets prevalent in the culture of disengagement are in direct contrast to an engineer’s calling to serve society and therefore provide a distinct challenge to engineering educators. This paper is part of a larger research study that seeks to understand why and how values-based learning outcomes (including DEI and social justice related outcomes) are (or are not) taught and assessed in the engineering curriculum.

In this paper, we investigate faculty perceptions of whether values are elicited in Canadian engineering design capstone courses. We surveyed faculty from all disciplines in all engineering capstone courses at all public Canadian engineering universities. We received 24 valid responses from across the country, from institutions that range from very small to very large, and from all disciplines.

Our survey asked questions about four broad aspects of values: fairness, human wellbeing, sustainability, and accountability. These aspects included co-values such as dignity, empathy, equity of access, social sustainability, and transparency.

Preliminary qualitative results indicate that there is a disconnect between how some faculty perceive the importance of the various co-values to the profession and whether they believe that the co-values are actively elicited in the capstone design course. Interestingly, almost all respondents who indicated that values were important to the profession but not elicited in the capstone design course identified as white males.

Common themes from open text responses include 'leveraging guest speakers' and 'assuming [value] will be elicited through teamwork', both of which point to faculty avoidance of teaching or assessing the value directly. Interestingly, most of the participants who indicated they were uncomfortable with directly teaching or assessing these values indicated that they had 6-10 years of teaching experience. Participants who identified as both older and younger seemed more comfortable addressing values.

Additional analysis is ongoing and will be completed in time for paper submission.