Sociotechnical Habits of Mind: Initial Survey Results and their Formative Impact on Sociotechnical Teaching and Learning

Abstract

She has researched wind turbine control systems since 2002, with numerous projects related to reducing turbine loads and increasing energy capture. She has applied experiential learning techniques in several wind energy and control systems classes and began engineering education research related to social justice in control systems engineering in fall 2014.

Initial Characterization of Novice Engineering Designers' Consideration of Contextual Factors

“…The limited number of teams that incorporated socio-cultural, environmental, and infrastructure, and political factors into their design processes suggests that students either perceived the factors to be outside the scope of their project (which may or may not be true), were not encouraged to incorporate these factors into their design processes, opted not to address these factors, and/or did not know how to incorporate these factors into their design processes. Ongoing research suggests that engineering students in the U.S. do not perceive social and environmental considerations to have the same significance as technical factors (Johnson et al, 2019) and experience difficulty justifying the value and relevance of "nontechnical work" (Niles et al, 2020). Importantly, none of the teams' reports described political factors in any manner.…”

“…Engineering education has historically focused on learning outcomes related to technical performance (Johnson et al, 2019;Leydens and Lucena, 2018), and there is a growing movement to incorporate learning experiences aimed at increasing students' awareness and consideration of broader contextual considerations, such as cultural, socio-technical, environmental, and economic factors (Christensen and Ernø-Kjølhede, 2012;Kyoung Ro et al, 2015;Neumeyer et al, 2013). For example, the U.S. engineering education Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) states that students must gain an ability to "make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts" (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, 2020).…”

“…However, the ways in which universities address the role of context in design are limited and vary considerably from program to program (Bielefeldt et al, 2017;Neumeyer et al, 2013). Thus, novice designers differ in their valuation of sociotechnical considerations (Johnson et al, 2019), breadth of contextual consideration during problem scoping (Atman et al, 2008), and ability to investigate contexts (Mohedas et al, 2014). Very little prior work has investigated novice designer understanding and incorporation of contextual factors during design processes.…”

Contextualization as Virtue in Engineering Education

“…However, the tool is not designed to measure students' thinking about their profession beyond the particular task, nor to assess the persistence of changes in thinking over time. Researchers at Colorado School of Mines and the University of Colorado, Boulder are working on an ongoing, larger-scale study of change in sociotechnical thinking over time [47], [48].…”

Real-world Examples and Sociotechnical Integration: What's the Connection?

“…Sociotechnical integration refers to the integration of the social and technical dimensions of engineering problems [3]. Such an integration is integral to engineering work [1], but often not made visible in engineering education.…”