Having empathy in the design process can help engineers relate to the end user by identifying what and why certain experiences are meaningful. While there have been efforts to identify the factors that impact empathic tendencies in engineering, there has been limited evidence on how a students' trait empathy or empathic self-efficacy develops over a design project or what factors impact this development. The current study was developed to explore the development of students' trait empathy and empathic self-efficacy development and identify the underlying impact of the design project's context and course instructor through a study with 103 engineering students. Students' trait empathy and empathic self-efficacy were measured across each of the four design stages (problem formulation, concept generation, concept selection, and final conceptual design) during an 8-week project. The results highlight that students' trait empathy and empathic self-efficacy did not increase across design stages and the context of the design problem did not impact students' empathy development. Meanwhile, the course instructor negatively impacted students' empathic self-efficacy in one of the three course sections studied, and two of the three interviewed course instructors reduced the role of empathy in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. These insights call for future research that could empirically assess the impact of trait empathy and empathic self-efficacy in driving design outcomes in the later design stages, which could increase engineering educators' awareness of the role of empathy in the engineering classroom.

A literature review revealed that the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) had been heavily examined as an overall relationship. However, there is a lack of research that examined the effect of organizational justice dimensions on OCB via affective organizational commitment as a mediator. Therefore, this research is an attempt to provide a value theoretical model that explains the relationships between dimensions of organizational justice and OCB as well as tries to describe in detail meaning of this relationship through the mediating effect of affective organizational commitment in the context of social exchange theory. Furthermore, the proposed hypotheses on the link between these variables are provided as a foundation for further research.

Product dissection has been highlighted as an effective means of interacting with example products in order to produce creative outcomes. While product dissection is often conducted as a team in engineering design education, the research on the effectiveness of product dissection activities has been primarily limited to individuals. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the type(s) of product dissected in a team environment on encouraging creative design outcomes (variety, novelty, and quantity) and the underlying influence of educational level and dissection modality on these effects. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 14,000 teams of noninteracting brainstorming individuals generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique using a design repository of 931 ideas generated by first-year and senior engineering students. The results of the study highlight the importance of educational level, dissection modality, and the number of products dissected on team design outcomes. Specifically, virtual dissection encouraged the exploration of more novel solutions across both educational levels. However, physical dissection encouraged the exploration of a larger variety and quantity of ideas for senior teams while virtual dissection encouraged the same in first-year teams. Finally, dissecting different types of products allowed teams to explore a larger solution space. The findings presented in this study can lead to a better understanding of how to deploy product dissection modules in engineering design education in order to drive creative design outcomes.

Engineers are typically asked to create slides to present their technical presentations in conferences, classrooms, and meetings. Most slides used by engineers follow a traditional PowerPoint style of a topic-subtopic structure. Contrary to the traditional bulleted PowerPoint, the Assertion Evidence (AE) slide structure replaces default phrase headlines with a succinct sentence, containing the main idea of the slide. While prior research has demonstrated that the AE style of presentations is effective towards audience comprehension of the technical presentation material, there is limited research on the effectiveness of AE slides for the presenters’ comprehension. The main goal of this study was to examine the impact of slide structure (AE or Traditional PowerPoint) on engineering students’ cognitive load, presentation self-efficacy, motivation, and performance. In order to assess this research goal, an exploratory study was conducted with 108 engineering students at Kuwait University where a group of students were asked to design slides using Assertion Evidence style of presentations and another group were asked to design slides using Traditional PowerPoint template. The main findings from this study highlighted that participants in the Assertion Evidence group had a lower perceived cognitive workload than participants that designed slides using the Traditional PowerPoint template. However, slide structure did not impact participants’ motivation, self-efficacy, and understanding of the presentation material. The results from this research can be used to drive effective communication of technical engineering presentations.

Over the past decade, engineering design research has seen a significant surge of the discussion of empathy. As such, design researchers have been devoted in devising and assessing empathic design activities. While prior research has examined the utility of empathic design experiences on driving creative concept generation, little is known about the role of a designer's empathic tendencies in driving creative concept generation and selection in an engineering design project. Without this knowledge, we cannot be sure if, when, or how empathy influences the design process. Thus, the main goal of this paper was to identify the role of trait empathy in creative concept generation and selection in an engineering design student project. In order to achieve this objective, a study was conducted with 103 first-year engineering students during two design stages of an 8-week design project (concept generation and concept selection). The main findings from this paper highlighted that empathic concern tendencies positively impacted the generation of more ideas while personal distress tendencies negatively impacted the generation of more ideas. During concept selection, perspective-taking tendencies positively impacted participants’ propensity for selecting elegant ideas. This research took the first step in encouraging empirical investigations aimed at understanding the role of trait empathy across different stages of the design process.