While engineering education excels at training students to solve well-defined and highly structured problems, it struggles to support the development of students’ abilities to address highly complex, ill-structured, and contested engineering problems that lack in definite solutions, where engineers are called on to work with non-engineers in a transdisciplinary environment.  The challenge for engineering educators is to develop and teach constructively aligned curricula aimed at developing transdisciplinary skills so that, as practitioners, graduating engineering students contribute to addressing these types of problems within transdisciplinary environments. Efforts are underway in many institutions to close the gap between the transdisciplinary needs in practice and current engineering curricula. At the University of British Columbia (UBC), a team of faculty members and engineering practitioners have recently developed and are teaching a design-focused engineering course to all first year students. In this paper we, a subset of UBC’s teaching team, present the argument for teaching skills to engineering students that support transdisciplinary. Wesummarize the definitions of these skills found in the literature, and we speculate that the development of one aspect of transdisciplinary is related to personal development. Specifically, we hypothesize that systems thinking is correlated to metacognition. We describe an experimental strategy for testing the hypothesis within a first year engineering program, then we present and discuss preliminary test results.

This paper will focus on the design anddevelopment of the Survey of Canadian EngineeringInstructors (SCEI), from framework to final implementedversion. The primary goal of this project was to increasethe experience and capacity for rigorous educationalresearch within the CEEA community, and to benchmarkengineering faculty attitudes towards teaching andlearning.The development, approval and implementation of thestudy are a key focus presented in this paper, with theintent of providing a holistic view of how the project ismanaged and enacted. Alongside this narrative are thepreliminary findings from the project thus far. Thesefindings provide insight into faculty perceptions andattitudes towards teaching and learning. These responseshighlight the need for a more in-depth analysis todetermine the interesting trends observed in the data.

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