Collaborative Research: Research: Assessing Empathic Formation in Engineering Design

移情对于识别、设计和满足用户需求是必不可少的，并且可以激励工程师有意义地参与和响应不同的观点和价值观。因此，教育工作者需要培养工程师同情心的工具。然而，测量同理心是具有挑战性的，因为它在不同的环境中表现得独特。为了开始解决对工程特定的移情测量的需求，我们开发并试点测试了一个评估工具。我们之前的工作表明，需要改进在设计阶段的各个方面衡量同理心的方式，并考虑不同用户群体的同理心差异。因此，在本研究中，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，以评估本科工程设计中不同背景、设计阶段和参与者的共情形成。我们将在扩展该工具时整合并考虑到这些观点，从而确保该工具能够捕捉到不同教师群体的观点和需求。因此，本研究将支持对评估工程设计同理心的有效工具的迫切需求。同理心可以提供“人类关心他人的火花”，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为用户的同理心成长。因此，衡量同理心可以帮助学生关心、理解和帮助有需要的用户。在本研究中，我们将迭代一种工具，与不同的工程设计导师一起评估同理心，以确定该工具的潜在改进，以改善其与环境的一致性，收集学生数据以确保潜在的工具改进能够准确地代表学生的体验，并设计一种修改后的工具，以解释这些新颖的见解。我们将通过大量学生样本的定量和定性数据的三角测量来测试修订后的工具的有效性。最后，我们将使用该工具来识别与各种教学设计背景和实践相关的共情形成的差异，从而产生关于促进工程设计中共情形成的最佳实践的新知识。我们的团队带来了在移情设计方面的先验研究，独特的工程背景，以及多种研究方法的专业知识，这将确保研究的严谨性和质量。我们的合作者是设计教育工作者，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。顾问委员会包括共情、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，以确保该工具代表了工程设计中共情研究的最新水平。通过向社区提供这一测量，我们可以促进共情和共情评估在工程课堂情境中的整合，这可以积极影响亲社会动机学生在工程专业的体验和保留。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.