Promoting engineering students’ social responsibility and willingness to act on socioscientific issues

Abstract

Background Despite increasing awareness of the importance of promoting the social responsibility of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals, few intervention programs have been developed to enhance the social responsibility of college students or adults in the STEM fields. In this paper, we introduced a new instructional program, called ENACT (engage, navigate, anticipate, conduct, and take action) and examined whether the program increased the social responsibility among safety engineering students (N = 46) recruited from a university located in a southern metropolitan area of South Korea. Results In the ENACT program, the college students selected and explored socioscientific issues (SSIs) of their own interest then autonomously engaged in scientific and engineering group projects spanning a semester where they developed solutions to the SSIs and shared them with their communities. At the conclusion of the intervention in this study, they displayed an increased social responsibility regarding the consideration of societal needs and demands, civic engagement and services, and participation in policy decision-making. Social responsibility scores measured after the intervention (post-test) correlated with students' willingness to voluntarily participate in projects involving SSIs. In addition, the intervention effects were more pronounced for the students who initially had medium and low social responsibility scores. Conclusions We have shown that social responsibility can be nurtured by systemic instructional approaches, and increased social responsibility can lead to greater commitment to resolving SSIs. Mastering engineering content knowledge and skills is the key element of engineering curricula. However, we are compelled to incorporate social responsibility into the STEM curriculum. We believe that the ENACT model contributes toward this end.

Global Catalysts: Empowering Universities for Social Change in Developing Countries

“…It is critical to encourage research and community interaction in order to strengthen university capacity and shape future socially conscious leaders. This method goes beyond the confines of the university, as professors and researchers apply their knowledge to real-world circumstances (Hwang et al, 2023).…”

The Triple Aim of a Semester-Long Course in Science, Technology, and Society

“…Some efforts to improve social awareness and responsibility among engineering students have been described in the literature. These efforts can be categorized into three main approaches, namely the adoption of nontraditional pedagogical approaches [5], [6], the development of new instructional programs [7] and the development of new education frameworks [8], [9]. Amos and Levinson [5] proposed the Socio-Scientific Inquiry-Based Learning (SSIBL) method to encourage science students to ask real-world questions, to collect evidence to answer these questions, and to take personal action on their findings.…”

“…Hwang et al [7] introduced an instructional program, called ENACT (engage, navigate, anticipate, conduct, and take action) and examined whether the program increased the social responsibility among safety engineering students in a southern metropolitan area of South Korea. Through the ENACT program, students were encouraged to explore a broad range of knowledge, engaged to collaborate and communicate with diverse stakeholders, and to participate in community service or volunteer activities.…”

“…Although the cited works [5]- [9] provide evidence of improvements in students' awareness and sense of responsibility toward the needs of society, there has been no concrete action plan to align students' awareness and sense of social responsibility with both the proposed I5.0 framework by the European Union and the the SDGs of the UN. Moreover, solutions proposed require either curriculum adaptation [8], [9], adaptation by multiple courses [5], [6] or the development of new programs [7]. We propose that a course like STS be employed as a standalone solution or as a solution to complement efforts to increase social awareness and responsibility among science and engineering students.…”

Teaching socioscientific issues in the digital age: Emerging trends and unexplored frontiers

“…SSI, inherently controversial, necessitates students to apply evidence-based reasoning, holds personal significance for them, and offers a contextual framework for understanding, all while requiring moral judgment and ethical assessment during the decision-making process concerning potential solutions to these issues (Zeidler, 2003). Integrating SSI into science education offers several benefits for both students and society as a whole including relevance to Real-World problems (Karisan & Zeidler, 2017), enhanced critical thinking and problem-solving (Gutierez, 2015), fostering interdisciplinary learning (Johnson et al, 2020), ethical and moral development (Zeidler et al, 2005), effective citizenship education (Chowdhury et al, 2020), heightened cultural and social awareness (Hwang et al, 2023) and improved scientific literacy (Zeidler & Kahn, 2014). There has been a plethora of additional pedagogical, curriculum, and epistemic outcomes and benefits that have been well-documented in reviews of the global extant literature involving hundreds of empirical and conceptual studies that have served as a foundation for the integration of SSI into science education (Zeidler & Sadler, 2023).…”