Collaborative Research: Research: Developing reflexive engineers through accessing and characterizing implicit beliefs about the value of diverse perspectives in service-learning

About This Grant

Solving society’s biggest problems, will require input from engineers and non-engineers, who have different backgrounds and ways of thinking. A good engineer must know how technology works but even more importantly, how technology might affect people and society. This means that engineering faculty need to prepare their students for working well with others and to respect their ideas. In order for engineering faculty to know how to best help their students, this project will conduct this research study to explore what engineering students believe about non-engineers when they are working together to solve problems in a community. This will be accomplished by 1) investigating different ways of determining what engineering students believe about those who are not engineers, 2) grouping students’ beliefs into categories that allow exploration of trends, and 3) working together with a team of students, community partners, and teachers to brainstorm ideas on how students can learn more about themselves. This will help make future professional engineers better, by showing students the importance of treating those who are not engineers with respect and valuing their ideas. The goal of this research study is to make sure that members of society do not experience negative impacts because of what engineers think or believe. The intent is to ensure that the work engineers do to help society is not unintentionally hurting communities or treating people who are different from them unfairly. This research will help engineering faculty learn more about what their students believe about non-engineers, which can help them teach in a way that truly makes engineering work benefit all of society by improving the way engineers solve problems. Since the professional socialization of engineering students commonly fosters the belief that engineers’ scientific approaches to problem solving are superior to other ways of thinking, it is important that engineering education provides students with explicit opportunities to reflect on, and learn to be critical of, such beliefs, a process known as reflexivity. This research will produce new knowledge on qualitative methods for effectively accessing implicit beliefs in engineering education. Service-learning in engineering provides an educational context to investigate this phenomenon as it explicitly positions students to engage with others in socio-technical contexts. With an overarching goal of fostering egalitarian beliefs about the value of diverse perspectives in all engineering students, this project will investigate the context of service-learning. Within this context, this project will produce knowledge that enables engineering educators and other researchers, both in and out of service-learning contexts, to access important constructs of professional formation through the contribution of a nuanced characterization of the beliefs held by engineering students. Our analysis will reveal the beliefs for engineering students that are both 1) commonly held, and 2) varied, enabling the identification of beliefs that exist at a broad, cultural level in engineering as well as beliefs that can be understood as implicit outcomes of students’ lived experiences. Lastly, the collaborative inquiry component of this project will produce recommendations for how these implicit belief patterns can be used as inputs for enhancing service-learning. This is a meaningful contribution in that it can inform the programmatic implementation of service-learning experiences and serve as evidence for the development of instructional tools that support enhancing service-learning curricula through promoting reflexivity in engineering students. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.