Collaborative Research: Research: Assessing Empathic Formation in Engineering Design

同理心对于识别、设计和满足用户需求至关重要，可以激励工程师有意义地参与并回应不同的观点和价值观。因此，教育工作者需要工具来培养工程师的同理心。然而，衡量同理心是具有挑战性的，因为它在不同的背景下表现得独一无二。为了开始解决对工程特定的同理心测量的需求，我们开发了一种评估工具，并进行了试点测试。我们之前的工作表明，需要改进在设计阶段的所有方面衡量共情的方式，并考虑到不同用户群体在共情方面的差异。因此，在这项研究中，我们的主要目标是完善这一工具，并确保其有效性、可靠性和公平性，以评估本科生工程设计中跨背景、设计阶段和参与者的共情形成。我们将在扩展该工具的过程中纳入并考虑这些观点，从而确保该工具包含不同的教员观点和需求。因此，这项研究将支持在工程设计中评估同理心的有效工具的迫切需要。同理心可以提供“人类对他人的关心的火花”，从而加强将同理心融入工程课程的努力，并帮助学生与用户和用户之间的同理心成长。因此，一定程度的同理心可以帮助学生关心、理解和帮助有需要的用户。在这项研究中，我们将与一组不同的工程设计教师一起迭代一种用于评估同理心的工具，以确定该工具的潜在改进，以改进其与他们的环境的一致性，收集学生数据，以确保潜在的工具改进，准确地代表学生的经验，并设计一个修订的工具，以解释这些新的见解。我们将通过对大量学生进行定量和定性数据的三角测量来检验修订后的工具的有效性。最后，我们将使用该工具来识别与不同教学设计背景和实践相关的共情形成的差异，从而产生关于在工程设计中促进共情形成的最佳实践的新知识。我们的团队在同理心设计、独特的工程背景和多种研究方法方面的专业知识将确保研究的严密性和质量。我们的合作者是设计教育者，因此将有助于确保该工具对跨学科和跨大学的工程设计课程有用。咨询委员会包括同理心、设计和心理测量学方面的专家，他们将提供外部评估和指导，以确保该仪器代表工程设计中同理心研究的最新水平。通过向社区提供这一措施，我们可以促进在工程课堂环境中整合共鸣和共鸣评估，这可以积极影响亲社会动机的学生在工程课程中的体验和留存。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Empathy is essential for identifying, designing for, and meeting user needs and can motivate engineers to meaningfully engage with and respond to diverse viewpoints and values. Thus, educators need tools for developing empathy in engineers. Yet, measuring empathy is challenging because it manifests uniquely in different contexts. To begin addressing the need for an engineering-specific measure of empathy, we developed and pilot-tested an assessment instrument. Our prior work suggested a need to improve how empathy is measured across all aspects of the design phases and to account for variation in empathy for distinct user groups. Thus, in this study, our primary objective is to refine this instrument and to ensure its validity, reliability, and fairness for assessing empathic formation in undergraduate engineering design across multiple contexts, design phases, and participants. We will integrate and account for these perspectives in the expansion of the instrument, thus ensuring that the instrument captures a diverse group of instructor perspectives and needs. Thus, this study will support a critical need for a valid tool for assessing empathy in engineering design.Empathy can provide the “spark of human concern for others,” thus bolstering efforts at integrating empathy into engineering curriculum and help students’ empathic growth with and for users. Thus, a measure of empathy can help students care, understand, and help users in need. In this study, we will iterate on an instrument for assessing empathy with a diverse group of engineering design instructors to identify potential refinements of the instrument needed to improve its alignment with their contexts, collect student data to ensure potential instrument refinements that accurately represent student experiences, and design a revised instrument that accounts for these novel insights. We will test the revised instrument for validity via the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data with a large sample of students. Finally, we will use the instrument to identify differences in empathic formation associated with various instructional design contexts and practices, thus generating new knowledge on best practices for promoting empathic formation in engineering design. Our team brings prior research in empathic design, distinct engineering backgrounds, and expertise in multiple research methodologies which will ensure research rigor and quality. Our collaborators are design educators and thus will help ensure the instrument is useful for engineering design courses across disciplines and across university sites. The advisory board includes experts in empathy, design, and psychometrics who will provide external evaluation and guidance to ensure that the instrument represents the state of the art of research on empathy in engineering design. By providing the community with this measure, we can facilitate the integration of empathy and assessment of empathy in engineering classroom contexts, which can positively impact the experience and retention of pro-socially motivated students in engineering programs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.