2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

From Problem Identification to Stakeholder Awareness: Systems Thinking Skill Assessment in Graduate Systems Engineering Course

Presented at Systems Engineering Division (SYS) Technical Session 2

At the graduate level, students are expected to progress beyond component-level problem solving toward synthesizing knowledge across disciplines, recognizing feedback loops, and anticipating unintended consequences. This research builds upon and extends prior work on systems thinking development by exploring its evolution from undergraduate to graduate contexts. Specifically, it investigates how advanced academic and professional experiences shape key systems thinking dimensions, including problem identification and stakeholder awareness and involvement.
We investigate these dimensions through an analysis of student responses from a graduate-level Systems Architecture course. While open to all UF engineering graduate students, the course is predominantly composed of Industrial and Systems Engineering majors. Applying Groh’s rubrics as an evaluative framework, we assessed responses collected over three consecutive years of course enrollments.
Our results indicate that, in general, graduate student participants demonstrated notable strengths in cross-disciplinary integration and consideration of long-term system impacts, moving beyond a narrow focus on discrete technical elements. However, certain aspects of systems thinking still require further development,
These findings underscore the influence of advanced education and professional experience in cultivating higher-order systems thinking, and point to opportunities for introducing targeted scaffolding strategies earlier in the engineering curriculum to accelerate these capabilities. Insights from this analysis will inform the development of instructional strategies that explicitly help to structure systems thinking learning content at the graduate level.

Authors

Dr. Mengyu Li http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-9145-8903 University of Florida [biography]

Mengyu (May) Li is an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. She teaches a diverse range of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Inventory and Supply Chain Systems, Models for Supply Chain Management, Engineering Economy, Senior Design Projects, Simulation, Systems Design, and Systems Architecture.

Beyond her teaching, May serves as a faculty senator and member of the Engineering Faculty Council at UF, where she advocates for faculty representation and actively contributes to policy development. She is also the director of the UF Outreach Engineering Management (OEM) Program, currently serving her second term and overseeing all operational aspects while bridging academic and administrative domains.
Andrea Goncher P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1913-408X University of Florida [biography]

Andrea Goncher is an Instructional Assistant Professor in Engineering Education at the University of Florida. She earned her PhD in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech and focuses on teaching and learning projects in human centered design and humanitarian engineering.
Dr. John Mendoza-Garcia http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4943-6222 University of Florida [biography]

Dr. John Mendoza-Garcia is an Instructional Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University, and earned a Master’s and a Bachelor’s degree in Systems and Computing Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, respectively. His teaching and research focus on developing professional competencies, including problem-solving, systems thinking, and design thinking. Before transitioning to academia, he worked in industry, gaining practical experience that informs his educational approach.
Paulina Gonzalez-Brito University of Florida
Armeet Kaur Gahra University of Florida

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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