2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

While engineering design is often taught as a purely technocentric process, a growing tradition in engineering education research acknowledges that engineering design entails making value-laden judgments against ill-defined, ambiguous, and/or competing social, technical, and sociotechnical criteria. In a recent manuscript, we argued that the assumption that engineering design is purely technical, coupled with the inherently sociotechnical nature of engineering judgments and decision making, make engineering design education particularly susceptible to the effects of misinformation and disinformation on how students go about doing engineering design, engaging with communities, and producing and evaluating artifacts. While studies on the impacts of misinformation and disinformation are growing in number and salience in science education, research on pedagogical strategies for supporting students’ learning about navigating misinformation and disinformation in engineering are less frequent, if non-existent, in the scholarly literature. In this paper, we first engage engineering educators and researchers in understanding how the artifacts students produce can embed and be manifestations of misinformation and disinformation about people, communities, and society. Second, we outline a research agenda for studying the ways in which misinformation and disinformation are manifested in students’ design thinking and learning. Finally, drawing on existing information literacy frameworks and engineering learning research, we outline pedagogical strategies to equip students with the necessary competencies for navigating information-rich environments during engineering design processes. Our goal is to start the conversation in engineering education around this emerging area of students’ learning that we believe is necessary for preparing future engineering for ethical professional practice.