2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

From Bias Awareness to Better Judgment: Storytelling as a Tool for Reflective Learning in Engineering Design Education
Bahar N. Pour, Jenn Campbell, David C. Jensen
University of Arkansas

This paper develops a framework for how storytelling and storification can enhance engineering students’ insight into cognitive biases in design decision-making, thereby strengthening their decision-making skills. Rooted in constructivist learning theory, the approach treats stories not as communication tools but as reflective narratives to transfer the meaning and integrate this knowledge, social interaction, and active meaning-making into existing mental models. Such stories and narratives can help provide a different perspective and increase awareness of cognitive biases. Therefore, this awareness can bring a new behavioral insight in ways that conventional instruction often does not. In this paper, we lay out a framework connecting construct narrative engagement, reflective processing, bias awareness, empathic framing, and adaptive judgment. Further, we articulate the hypothesized causal pathways among these constructs.
We provide initial support for this framework by drawing on preliminary qualitative responses from 235 undergraduate engineering students in design courses at a public R1 university. We developed and introduced a learning module with the objective of increasing awareness of cognitive biases and their effect in engineering design through developed stories focused on teaching students about the self-relevance effect, or our tendency to better remember and prioritize information if it is related to ourselves. Initial qualitative responses from students via reflective exercises and open-ended questionnaires illustrate how stories prompt them to question their own assumptions, recognize hidden heuristics, and reconsider “obvious” design choices. We use these responses to sketch potential links among our constructs of interest. We discuss plans for future work to refine the learning module and design future studies to test our framework. Our long-term objective is to integrate stories, bias-awareness, and engineering judgment literature into a cohesive pedagogical model. We propose that storification can act as a reflective catalyst activating narrative engagement, reflective processing, bias awareness, empathic framing, and adaptive judgment, which are key precursors to behavioral change in design reasoning.
Our preliminary findings highlight the potential of using stories in learning modules to cultivate improved understanding of cognitive biases in design, leading to more sophisticated and reflective engineering decision-making. This work aligns with the thematic area of Teaching Curriculum and Pedagogy by advancing narrative-based instructional strategies that integrate psychological and design-thinking principles. By framing cognitive bias education within a storified, constructivist approach, this study contributes to the development of pedagogical models that foster metacognitive awareness and adaptive judgment among future engineers.