Engineering education provides students with foundational technical knowledge and skills, as well as a sense of engineering identity. Yet as prior sociological studies suggest, most engineering degree programs place primary emphasis on technical topics, which tends to marginalize or exclude the social dimensions of engineering identity and work practices. This investigation responds to such research by exploring engineering students' cognitive perceptions of their social and technical worlds, the relationship between their perceptions of these two domains, and how such perceptions develop. This study employs an embedded, sequential mixed-methods approach, which includes an interpretive phenomenological analysis of how engineering students integrate and/or split their social and technical perceptions of engineering ability and identity. This qualitative portion of the study is preceded and supported by data from instruments that probe how students perceive and orient to their social and technical worlds.
The proposed investigation builds on literature from the social sciences, psychology, and engineering education by examining students' technical and social perceptions. It fills a gap in the existing research by investigating the cognitive models that undergird how students develop the integrated, sociotechnical perception needed to address the broad, global challenges facing engineers today. This project lays key foundations for reforming curricula to enhance the development of these perceptive abilities and associated skills within engineering education. This investigation has potential for broad impact by informing engineering educators of critical experiences that shape the technical and social perceptions of students. The findings can be used to develop curricula, assessment techniques, and pedagogical strategies that better enable educators to guide students into a coherent integration of their social and technical perceptions. Such integration can cultivate engineers with enhanced capabilities who can tackle the engineering problems marked by sociotechnical complexity, including the "grand challenges" that face society. Integrating social and technical perceptions within the curriculum also has potential to enhance diversity in engineering by appealing to underrepresented groups of students who may be drawn toward more integrated, sociotechnical approaches to engineering.
