Examining Underemphasized Engineering Practices: Engineering Students? Alignment with Curricular Emphases and Engagement with Divergent Thinking

Abstract

Engineering students need to prepare to address increasingly complex, contextual, and ambiguous problems in their future careers. Many students pursue engineering to improve societal problems and create innovative solutions. Yet, divergent thinking needed for creativity, and the consideration of multiple social issues and a variety of contexts, is underemphasized in engineering education. Lack of this essential training hampers students’ abilities to address sociotechnical problems and heightens risk of harm from their engineering solutions. Without social, contextual, and divergent thinking emphases during engineering training, historically marginalized students invested in these practices may be deterred from pursuing and persisting in engineering education. My dissertation addresses the underemphasis of divergent thinking and other important skills to address complex problems in engineering education through three distinct studies within a variety of engineering student experiences.

In my first study, I explored undergraduate mechanical engineering students’ perceptions of knowledge, skills, and messaging in their core engineering courses, how these emphases may (mis)align with students’ interests and values, and the impact of (mis)alignments on engineering students’ persistence, sense of fit, and career intentions in engineering. Leveraging multiple semi-structured interviews with 30 undergraduate mechanical engineering students, I identified curricular emphases students explicitly described as emphasized or not/seldom emphasized in the mechanical engineering curriculum. I also characterized (mis)alignments between student interests and the curriculum and students’ compensatory actions to enable them to persist in engineering and aspiring career interests in response to their (mis)alignments.

My second study examined mechanical engineering students’ divergent thinking. I utilized semi-structured interviews to capture the depth and nuance of how and why students said they did or did not consider multiple options in several key points during varied engineering projects. I identified influential resources and structural, environmental, individual, and team factors that affected mechanical engineering students’ divergent thinking. I leveraged narrative inquiry to elucidate how these intersecting factors affected students’ divergent thinking. From these findings, I constructed narratives that also serve as pedagogical tools to support students and faculty learning about intentional divergent thinking in engineering.

My final study examined patterns of divergent thinking in engineering students’ idea development. The A/B study design compared student iterative concept transformation on their own and using Design Heuristics cards. In the first round, they generated and selected an early concept, and iteratively transformed it without the tool four times. In the second round, students returned to their selected early concept and transformed it four more times using up to seven Design Heuristics cards. I analyzed over 500 concepts, identifying both sequential and non-sequential links across concept generation sessions and developed Design Transformation Diagrams to identify patterns across students’ idea changes. My findings showed iterative transformations in combination with Design Heuristics can assist students in deeper exploration and create more varied and distinct concepts without an escape from the influence of existing concepts.

My work in this dissertation provides insights into engineering creativity and other underemphasized practices important to educating engineers for today’s complex sociotechnical problems. Engineering education must provide opportunities, scaffolding, and practice where students can develop their knowledge and skills and experience more alignment of their values and interests in engineering curricula. Based on my findings, I recommend tools, strategies, and curricular changes to improve scaffolding of creative and sociotechnical processes that must be enhanced and more explicitly and intentionally integrated into today’s engineering curricula.