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

从二元论到“一体化”：工科学生社会技术感知的发展研究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，正如先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维度。本调查通过探索工科学生对社会和技术世界的认知感知，他们对这两个领域的感知之间的关系，以及这种感知是如何发展的，来回应这些研究。本研究采用嵌入式、顺序混合方法，其中包括对工程专业学生如何整合和/或分裂他们对工程能力和身份的社会和技术感知的解释性现象学分析。研究的这一定性部分之前和支持的数据来自于探究学生如何感知和定位他们的社会和技术世界的工具。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观念。它通过调查认知模型来填补现有研究的空白，这些模型支持学生如何发展综合的社会技术感知，以应对当今工程师面临的广泛的全球挑战。这个项目为改革课程奠定了重要的基础，以加强这些感知能力和相关技能在工程教育中的发展。这项调查有可能产生广泛的影响，通过告知工程教育工作者的关键经验，塑造学生的技术和社会观念。研究结果可用于制定课程、评估技术和教学策略，使教育工作者能够更好地指导学生连贯地整合他们的社会和技术观念。这样的整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”。在课程中整合社会和技术观念也有可能通过吸引那些可能被更综合的社会技术方法所吸引的未被充分代表的学生群体来增强工程的多样性。

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.