Abstract
<strong>Background:</strong> Engineers need to be able to make robust design decisions. Because design is an ill-structured endeavor, design decisions require some combination of rationalistic, intuitive, and empathic approaches. However, engineering education remains largely oriented towards the use of rationalistic approaches. <strong>Purpose/Hypothesis:</strong> We posit that the persistent gap between the need to leverage diverse approaches to make engineering design decisions and the emphasis on primarily rationalistic approaches in engineering spaces is due, in part, to the beliefs that individuals hold about diverse approaches. <strong>Design/Method:</strong> We analyzed interview transcripts to identify the beliefs shared by students and by faculty (as individual units of analysis) about rationalistic, intuitive, and empathic approaches to making engineering design decisions, and then we compared the shared beliefs of the two groups. <strong>Results:</strong> Students and faculty similarly shared a belief that rationalistic approaches are normative in engineering. The two groups also had a common, general belief that empathic approaches are missing in engineering, but they differed in the ways in which they talked about empathic approaches. Finally, the two groups differed in their beliefs about the role of diverse approaches in practice: students believed rationalistic approaches are and should be used most in practice, but faculty believed that rationalistic approaches are inherently limited and therefore require the use of intuitive approaches. <strong>Conclusions:</strong> We interpret the pervasive belief that engineers are expected to portray their design decision making as primarily rational as a reflection of an unrealistic yet powerful social norm in engineering spaces, which can be understood as a key part of how the exclusive culture of engineering is perpetuated. We see a need to teach explicitly about this social norm in order to disrupt it, and we encourage engineering educators to reflect on how the ways in which their praxis might endorse or reinforce such unrealistic beliefs, either explicitly or implicitly.
Highlights
Introduction & BackgroundDesign is central to engineering practice (Sheppard et al, 2008), and design is a series of decisions to be made (Akin & Lin, 1995; Strobel & Pan, 2011)
Findings we detail the findings from our second order data analysis comparing the shared beliefs of students to the shared beliefs of faculty about rationalistic, intuitive, and empathic approaches to making engineering design decisions
6.1 Students and Faculty Were Similar in Their Shared Belief That Rationalistic Approaches Are Normative in Engineering Our first finding is that students and faculty were similar in that they both held the shared belief that rationalistic approaches are normative in engineering, meaning that rationalistic approaches are valued and expected as the way to make and justify engineering decisions
Summary
Introduction & BackgroundDesign is central to engineering practice (Sheppard et al, 2008), and design is a series of decisions to be made (Akin & Lin, 1995; Strobel & Pan, 2011). The bulk of research on decision making has historically assumed that people act rationally in order to make decisions that provide the greatest utility, and most of the work in decision making has been aimed at generating or refining techniques to aid people in making decisions rationally (Jonassen, 2012) This normative view of decisions as solely or primarily being made using rationalistic approaches does not hold up as complete based on investigations of real-world decision making because people do not strictly follow prescriptive models when making decisions (for summary, see Jonassen, 2012). Design/Method: We analyzed interview transcripts to identify the beliefs shared by students and by faculty (as individual units of analysis) about rationalistic, intuitive, and empathic approaches to making engineering design decisions, and we compared the shared beliefs of the two groups. We see a need to teach explicitly about this social norm in order to disrupt it, and we encourage engineering educators to reflect on how the ways in which their praxis might endorse or reinforce such unrealistic beliefs, either explicitly or implicitly
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
