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interests include developing pedagogical strategies to improve STEM students' ethical reasoning skills; exploring the role of empathy within design, innovation and sustainability; synthesizing the influence of societal and individual worldviews on decision-making; assessing STEM students' learning in the spaces of design, ethics, and sustainability; and exploring the impact of pre-engineering curriculum on students' abilities and career trajectories. The Development and Growth of Empathy among Engineering Students AbstractDiscourse on empathy is growing globally, as is its focus within the engineering community. In the context of engineering, scholars have depicted this interpersonal phenomenon as a necessary skill for effectively communicating, a core component of ethical reasoning, and a key technique for designing to meet the needs of users. However, literature regarding its development within engineering is rather limited, and the literature that does exist is disconnected. Even literature outside of engineering tends to focus on childhood development as opposed to adult development. While the developmental literature may tend to focus on earlier ages (likely because this is when an individual most rapidly develops), the endeavor of empathic growth and development need not be abandoned within post-secondary education. Rather, it indicates that we lack an understanding of the ideal means for empathic development later in one's life.Given the growing emphasis on the necessity of empathy to thrive as an engineer, engineering educators need to understand the constellation of existing tools and pedagogical techniques to foster empathy within the engineering curriculum. This synthesis piece highlights a variety of educational contexts and pedagogical techniques, each of which we posit are equally salient and mutually supportive for the development of engineering students' empathic skills, abilities, or dispositions. We draw from literature from a wide variety of fields, including counselling, psychology, moral philosophy, psychotherapy, neuropsychology, and engineering education. In sum, we describe five educational contexts and a myriad of techniques that we posit, when used effectively and spread across engineering curricula, will be effective means towards the development of empathy among engineering students.

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The primary goal of engineering education is to prepare students to work as productive engineers in society. This preparation traditionally focuses on developing students' discipline related technical and analytical knowledge, skills, and abilities. However, recent initiatives to develop a more holistic engineer have shed light on an aspect of engineering education that is largely lacking-the development of essential nontechnical knowledge, skills and abilities. In this paper, we propose a framework for considering the people part of engineering to organize these other kinds of knowledge, skills, and abilities that need to be addressed in engineering education.Informed by scholarly literature on development and learning, the framework presented in this work argues for people as central to engineering. We offer a framework on engineering for, with, and as people. Engineering for people requires a sense of the influences, constraints, and criteria people impose on the design and development of engineering solutions. Engineering with people emphasizes working collaboratively with a diverse group of people. Engineering as a person has one recognize the values, beliefs, knowledge, and skills driving the development of engineered solutions. We present examples of pedagogical strategies to integrate the various "people" skills into engineering courses and programs.

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Innovation is a key competency in engineering. Researchers and educators have long explored the processes, attributes, and environments of innovators with an aim to support engineering students in developing the competencies necessary to innovate. Yet, innovation is a complex phenomenon with many potential paths. In a recent phenomenographic study of engineering students, we found eight distinct ways of experiencing innovation. While these different ways of experiencing innovation were not necessarily better or worse, they could be compared in terms of their comprehensiveness, especially with respect to the innovation process and the issues (e.g., technical, user, or business) that drove innovation. In this study, we performed a two-phase qualitative analysis to understand how individual characteristics of the engineering students and contextual characteristics of the engineering projects in which they encountered innovation intersected to influence them to experience innovation in one of the eight categories described in the earlier study. In the first phase, we used content analysis to catalog distinct individual and project characteristics and explore similarities among participants in each of the eight categories. In the second phase, we used thematic analysis to describe, at a more general level, how individual participants came to experience innovation in more comprehensive ways. Content analysis showed that individuals may be drawn to specific categories due to nuanced connections between individual and project characteristics, while thematic analysis demonstrated three general pathways to more comprehensive categories, including (1) comprehensiveness of the innovation project experience, (2) connections between project goals and an individuals' interests and values, and (3) acute or persistent tensions between current perspectives and innovation experiences. We discuss these results in depth and describe implications for teaching and learning engineering innovation.

Emily Dringenberg is a PhD Candidate in Engineering Education at Purdue University. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (Kansas State '08) and a Master of Science in Industrial Engineering (Purdue '14). Her current dissertation research focuses on using qualitative methods to explore the experiences of students engaging with engineering design problems. Additionally, her research interests include transfer of learning, personal epistemology, and design learning.John Alexander Mendoza-Garcia, Purdue University, West Lafayette / Pontificia Universidad Javeriana -Bogota, ColombiaJohn Mendoza-Garcia is a Colombian Systems Engineer (Bachelor's and Master's degree) that currently is a Ph.D candidate in Engineering Education at Purdue University. His advisors are Dr. Monica E. Cardella and Dr. William C. Oakes. He is interested in understanding the development of systems thinking to support its assessment and teaching. Currently, he works for the first year engineering program at Purdue where he has taught the engineering introductory courses in design and algorithmic thinking, and has also developed content for these courses. He has an appointment with the department of systems engineering at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia since 2005 and is currently on a leave of absence. There he taught systems thinking and coordinated the professional internships, the social internships and the graduation project. He worked as Software Engineer in different companies for seven years before transitioning to academia. Reflections on each of these considerations are summarized and provided in full. Our analysis of the reflections revealed that the application of the phenomenographic methodology must respond to nuances in individual contexts. Thus, the primary contribution of this paper is the identification of five key considerations that can help guide a phenomenographic research approach, and transparency of how five emerging phenomenographic researchers have dealt with these considerations.

interests include developing pedagogical strategies to improve STEM students' ethical reasoning skills; exploring the role of empathy within design, innovation and sustainability; synthesizing the influence of societal and individual worldviews on decision-making; assessing STEM students' learning in the spaces of design, ethics, and sustainability; and exploring the impact of pre-engineering curriculum on students' abilities and career trajectories.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 In Their Shoes: Student Perspectives on the Connection between Empathy and Engineering AbstractAn emerging body of literature highlights the importance of empathy within engineering work and explores how engineering students develop empathic tendencies and utilize empathy during design. Still, more work needs to be done to better understand how engineering students conceptualize empathy and view its role in engineering practice. In this study, we explored the ways that engineering students described empathy and its application in their engineering work. Eight engineering students, from seven different majors, ranging from juniors to doctoral students, participated semi-structured interviews focused on the empathy in engineering. Using thematic analysis we uncovered three themes revealing engineering students' experiences with empathy (understanding others' feelings, important in everyday life, generally outside the scope of engineering) and four themes revealing potential uses for empathy in engineering work (team settings, problem contextualization, human-centered design, individual inspiration). These findings highlight existing gaps between students' perceptions of empathy as compared to scholarly literature on the role of empathy in engineering and perceptions from engineering faculty and practicing engineers. For example, the themes demonstrate that students are often generally aware of certain potential uses of empathy, but have not necessarily experienced those uses in their own work. In the paper, we discuss how alignments or discrepancies between student and expert perceptions both extend our notions of the role of empathy in engineering and identify areas that can be better supported through engineering instruction.