Sociotechnical Education and Engineering Identity in Undergraduate Students
By: Min Ha Hwang and Lizzy Trueblood
Department: Computer Engineering
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Stephanie Claussen
Engineering education is widely perceived as focusing entirely on difficult technical analysis at the exclusion of consideration for the social contexts associated with such work. However, in reality, engineering practice is often concerned with defining and solving problems that are both technical and social in nature, which require professional engineers to understand the complex connections between technical and social considerations. In recent years, there have been efforts across a number of research projects and curriculum development efforts to integrate sociotechnical thinking into students’ engineering courses. This paper leverages one such project to explore the connection between sociotechnical thinking and the development of an engineering identity in students. Our analysis aimed to answer the following research question: How do engineering students’ beliefs about engineering practice, their perceptions of sociotechnical thinking, and their self-reported engineering identities relate to one another? Our paper presents the results from analysis of student focus groups using inductive coding to explore the connections between students’ beliefs about engineering practice, their perceptions of sociotechnical thinking in their engineering education, and their self-reported engineering identities. We identify and describe four clusters of students which capture the most common interactions between these three dimensions (engineering identity, perceptions of sociotechnical education, and views of engineering practice), and discuss the implications of these clusters for broadening participation in engineering and engineering education.