From Dualism to Integration Investigating Development of Engineering Students' Social and Technical Perceptions

从二元论到“整合论”：工科学生社会技术意识发展调查工程教育为学生提供基础的技术知识和技能，以及工程认同感。然而，正如之前的社会学研究表明的那样，大多数工程学位课程主要强调技术主题，这往往会边缘化或排除工程身份和工作实践的社会层面。这项调查通过探索工科学生对他们的社会和技术世界的认知感知，他们对这两个领域的认知之间的关系，以及这些认知是如何发展的，来回应这一研究。本研究采用一种嵌入的、顺序的混合方法，其中包括对工科学生如何整合和/或分裂他们对工程能力和身份的社会和技术知觉的解释性现象学分析。这项研究的定性部分是由调查学生如何感知和适应他们的社会和技术世界的工具提供的数据支持的。拟议的调查建立在社会科学、心理学和工程教育的文献基础上，通过检查学生的技术和社会感知。它通过调查认知模型填补了现有研究的空白，这些认知模型支撑了学生如何发展应对当今工程师面临的广泛全球挑战所需的整合的社会技术感知。该项目为课程改革奠定了关键基础，以便在工程教育中加强这些感知能力和相关技能的发展。这项调查有可能产生广泛的影响，因为它向工程教育者提供了塑造学生技术和社会认知的关键经验。这些发现可以用来开发课程、评估技术和教学策略，使教育工作者能够更好地引导学生将他们的社会和技术观念连贯地整合在一起。这种融合可以培养具有增强能力的工程师，他们能够解决以社会技术复杂性为标志的工程问题，包括社会面临的“重大挑战”。将社会和技术观念整合到课程中，也有可能通过吸引代表性不足的学生群体来增强工程学的多样性，这些学生可能会被更具综合性的、更具社会技术性的工程方法所吸引。

From Dualism to "Integration":Investigating Development of Engineering Students' Social and Technical PerceptionsEngineering 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.