Engineering Identity, Perceptions of Sociotechnical Education, and Views of Engineering Practice in Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Engineering education is widely perceived as focusing entirely on difficult technical analysis at the exclusion of consideration for the social contexts associated with such work. However, in reality, engineering practice is concerned with defining and solving problems which are both technical and social in nature and which require professional engineers to understand the complex connections between technical and social considerations. In recent years, there have been efforts across a number of research projects and curriculum development efforts to integrate sociotechnical thinking into students’ engineering courses. This paper leverages one such project to explore the connection between sociotechnical thinking and the development of an engineering identity in students. It presents the results from analysis of student focus groups using inductive coding to explore the connections between students’ beliefs about engineering practice, their perceptions of sociotechnical thinking in their engineering education, and their self-reported engineering identities. We identify and describe four clusters of students which capture the most common interactions between these three dimensions and discuss the implications of these clusters for broadening participation in engineering and engineering education.