ABSTRACT Sustainability has become a central concern in engineering education, requiring future engineers to address complex ecological, social, and economic challenges while exercising professional agency. This study examines engineering students’ perceptions of their sustainability agency within a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) environment, using Q methodology to capture diverse viewpoints among students enrolled in the same course. The analysis identified four key factors shaping sustainability agency: (1) educational opportunities combined with institutional support, (2) societal engagement through teamwork and collaboration, (3) emotional and motivational drivers, and (4) knowledge of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within a supportive learning framework. These factors represent complementary pathways through which students enact agency. The findings demonstrate that diversity of perspectives functions as a generative and enabling condition for learning in PBL, as it fosters dialogue, negotiation, and collective sense-making around complex sustainability problems. The study highlights the importance of intentionally designing large-scale, interdisciplinary PBL projects that connect students with real-world sustainability challenges and provide institutional support for sustained engagement. Such learning environments can strengthen engineering students’ capacity to navigate uncertainty, work across disciplinary boundaries, and act as proactive agents of sustainable change.

ABSTRACT Design thinking is widely adopted in engineering education to develop human-centred design capabilities, yet practices remain fragmented due to varied implementations, organisational barriers, and persistent gaps between theory and application. This literature review examines how design thinking has been conceptualised, implemented, and evaluated in higher engineering education from 2003 to 2023, analysing 76 empirical studies through a HOW (implementation strategies)–WHAT (core elements)–WHY (adoption rationales) framework. Findings reveal rapid growth after 2018, consolidation around three primary definitional sources, and widespread adoption of Stanford's five-stage model. Integration remains predominantly course-based rather than programme-wide. Four core competencies emerge across studies: creativity, collaboration, empathy, and problem-solving. Such consistency across institutional contexts and engineering disciplines underscores design thinking's potential to address persistent gaps in traditional curricula. Assessment approaches demonstrate methodological pluralism, though direct observation remains rare. This review offers evidence-based guidance for implementing design thinking in engineering education’.

ABSTRACT Gaps between how individuals believe they will behave and how they actually behave can be consequential, particularly in engineering education and engineering practice. Research addressing such gaps must first identify where they exist. This paper presents research design steps intended to support scholars in systematically comparing beliefs about intended behaviour with observed behaviour. We articulate three key steps: operationalising a phenomenon as a measurable behaviour and belief about that same behaviour, designing data collection and analysis methods that validly capture each construct, and creating an appropriate means of comparison. For each step, we describe key considerations, relevant prior work, and guiding questions. We illustrate implementation via case study examining engineering students’ ’process safety judgements. Although the examples centre process safety, these steps are intentionally generalisable across engineering education and professional practice. This framework enables actionable insights and provides a foundation for future work aimed at reflection, change, and improved beliefs-behaviours.

ABSTRACT Employability has become a central concern in engineering and higher education, with universities increasingly expected to prepare graduates for both initial employment and long-term career development. Within this context, effective frameworks are essential for guiding competency assessment and redesigning engineering programs to better equip students for professional life. Despite the availability of generic employability frameworks, there is limited empirical evidence regarding their efficacy within specific disciplines. Specifically, this study provides a transparent case example of applying a generic employability framework to categorise engineering-specific employability items and examines the challenges encountered in this process. A total of 88 employability items identified across 29 review papers were classified using the selected framework. The analysis revealed significant conceptual overlaps and several items that defied neat classification. These findings highlight the need for overarching institutional frameworks complemented by discipline-specific frameworks that accurately capture how employability manifests in particular disciplines.

ABSTRACT Our investigation focused on the perceptions and views of engineering professors regarding their understanding of the meaning of being a teacher, including their life stories and relationships with others and themselves. By doing so, the idea was to identify the characteristics, elements or factors of their identities. This study considered a narrative inquiry approach to explore the stories and experiences of engineering professors who teach in higher education through unstructured interviews and field records. Our study revealed two key themes that intimately reflect the identities and perceptions of these engineering professors as teachers: (a) To be a teacher and always to do the best, and (b) To be a teacher and to be many other things. From the results, we can observe that the identity of engineering professors is being constructed/modelled as the meanings of what they understand about what it means to be a teacher are negotiated in their work environments and contexts, thus directing their actions.

ABSTRACT ‘If you cannot explain a concept to a six-year-old child, it means you do not fully understand it.' This study investigates the 'Les Petits Constructeurs' program, where architecture Master’s students are tasked with transmitted complex concepts of structural morphology and construction logic to children aged 6-10. Research aims to determine if this mediation enhances students' technical understanding. A comparative evaluation with a control group reveals that students involved in teaching children showed a significantly higher progression in technical knowledge acquisition. Paradoxically, their self-reported confidence and perception of the discipline exhibited limited variation, highlighting a dissociation between measured learning outcomes and perceived competence. Ultimately, the findings suggest that knowledge mediation—simplifying expertise for a non-specialist audience—is a powerful pedagogical tool. It enhances conceptual clarity more effectively than standard methods, proving that the challenge of explaining “how things hold up” to a six-year-old is a rigorous path to professional expertise.

ABSTRACT Engineering graduates can be important catalysts for societal sustainability transformation. Integrative and transformative response strategies for engineering curricula have been proposed to enhance the required graduate sustainability competencies. Less is known about the working life perceptions of such competencies and whether graduates have opportunities to act for sustainability in their workplaces. We employed a mixed-methods approach to explore employers’ views on graduates’ competencies, performance, and possibilities to influence sustainability in the workplace. The results indicate that graduates are expected to apply sustainability independently to their work. Furthermore, the results underscore the importance of promoting employability, sustainability, and future skills competencies in engineering education, with an emphasis on agency and the motivational and value-related aspects of sustainability. Overall, the findings encourage the application of contextualised and transformative pedagogical approaches in cooperation with working-life actors to ensure that the sustainability contributions of engineering graduates are supported by their education and workplaces.

ABSTRACT This mixed-methods study explores a PBL facilitation model based on Jonassen's design theory of problem solving. Jonassen's theory was operationalised in two different sections of an introductory aerospace engineering course. One was facilitated through problem-typology (PT-section) while the other used no formal scaffold (NPT-section). The impact of the scaffold on students' problem engagement was explored through students' solution artefacts, a pre/post self-efficacy survey and debrief interviews. Results show that PT-section artefacts evidenced more information related to the resolution of problem ill-structuredness and complexity than NPT-section artefacts. PT-section students were also more confident in their problem solutions and their ability to solve similar problems in the future. Two important implications stem from this study. First, a better understanding of how classroom discourse impacts the salience of structuredness and complexity for students is needed. Additionally, developing the technical communication skills of undergraduates is vital for a holistic assessment of their problem-specific reasoning.

ABSTRACT In engineering education, the integration of disciplinary, societal, and ecological perspectives is facilitated by boundary crossing. This competency is cultivated through boundary-crossing learning mechanisms and is considered essential for students in interdisciplinary challenges in complex learning environments. However, limited research exists on students' perceptions of their own learning processes when developing the complex skill of boundary crossing. This paper, therefore, investigates boundary-crossing learning mechanisms, sub-mechanisms, and frictions that drive learning. The authors qualitatively analysed 720 reflection documents from 180 students in a 2nd-year interdisciplinary engineering master's course. The study reveals a progression from recognising strengths to calibrating expectations, identifying weaknesses, and positioning within meaningful activities. Identity (I) Concepts were used to examine frictions in this process, showing students engaged with themes such as self-knowledge, interdisciplinary teamwork, relationship building, and approaches to culture, structure, and planning. These insights may inform the design of interdisciplinary engineering education as transformational learning journeys.