2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Modern engineering work is inherently sociotechnical - shaped by the context in which it occurs and influencing countless aspects of human lives and the world we inhabit. Within engineering education, there remains a need for strategies to support students in developing the ability to pair technological proficiency with the awareness and skills needed to account for the many social and contextual dimensions of engineering problems. Students may receive mixed messages about what engineering practice entails; efforts to promote sociotechnical engineering may run counter to the often narrowly technical focus of undergraduate engineering curricula. In order to gain greater insight into if and how students perceive sociotechnical topics to be relevant and transferable to their future academic and professional work, our team conducted focus group interviews with 16 undergraduate engineering students who participated in one or more class sessions on sociotechnical engineering topics developed by the Center for Socially Engaged Engineering and Design. Students described the role of these course sessions in advancing their understanding of the societal impacts of engineering work and the skills needed to account for multiple perspectives of interested parties or balance competing social, contextual, economic, and technical dimensions. Students appreciated engaging with authentic and contextualized examples of engineering practice and generally noted the relevance of sociotechnical skills for their future engineering work. However, a subset of students described the sociotechnical sessions as feeling disconnected from the technical focus of much of their curricula or expressed uncertainty about the opportunities they would have to engage with social and contextual aspects of the work in entry-level roles. These findings reinforce the need for more than a single intervention or stand-alone effort to support students' development of the skills needed for sociotechnical engineering practice and point to opportunities to coordinate across individual courses, initiatives, and/or institutions.