What Are They Talking About? Depth of Engineering Student Sociotechnical Thinking in a Technical Engineering Course

Abstract

is a Lecturer in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Maryland College Park. Her responsibilities include teaching various undergraduate courses in environmental engineering (such as Engineering for Sustainability and Environmental Engineering Science) and conducting engineering education research. She has specialized in redesigning engineering courses to make them learner-centered and based on active learning activities. More recently, she started work on engineering education research that aims to effectively incorporate socio-technical thinking in required technical courses. Her discipline research is focused on the production of stabilized biosolids, its use as a fertilizer and its impact on environmental pollution concerning organic contaminants. She recently has started work on Amazonic mercury contamination due to illegal mining.

Real-world Examples and Sociotechnical Integration: What's the Connection?

“…Finally, it is difficult to achieve complex sociotechnical integration -especially that which moves beyond economic and environmental considerations in order to elicit second-order sociotechnical thinking [36] -in a limited amount of time. By necessity, real-world examples with effective sociotechnical integration take time to convey information, present diverse perspectives, and allow the students to process and discuss.…”

“…Andrade and Tomblim's follow-on work used both thematic and open coding to look at student written responses following the EV/AV activity more deeply, with a specific emphasis on understanding the instrumental and non-instrumental constructs students use in discussing sociotechnical systems [36]. The authors define instrumental thinking as a "narrow view of how humans impact technology and how technology can impact humans."…”

Characterizing student argument justifications in small group sociotechnical discussions

“…We will use 'common narratives' to describe these perspectives, while others have used engineering mindsets, underlying worldviews [20], and ideologies [3]; these perspectives are also aligned with Radoff et al's description of narrow thinking [13]. Previous research has looked at how undergraduate engineering students align with these common narratives in interviews and focus groups with students [10,13], surveys [19], student classwork [15], and whole class discussions [7,14]. The four common narratives that are pertinent to this study are technocracy, free market idealism, technological neutrality, and technological determinism.…”

“…Research in this space is still identifying what to expect of students and how to support deeper engagement in sociotechnical topics. This is being investigated through, for example, analyzing student interviews and focus groups [10][11][12][13], in class whole-group discussion [7,14], and students' written work [15]. Here, we build on this research base by looking at small group inclass discussions.…”

Sociotechnical Integration: What Is It? Why Do We Need It? How Do We Do It?

“…This paper explores sociotechnical education as an antidote to the narrow technical specialization typical of most contemporary engineering education. Sociotechnical frameworks for understanding engineering practice have been common in science and technology studies (STS) for decades [1] and are increasingly found in discussions within engineering education spaces [2,3,4,5]. In fact, sociotechnical approaches to engineering education are even being adopted by disciplinary engineering faculty in traditional technical engineering courses, often through collaborative initiatives driven by faculty with training in or exposure to STS [6,7].…”