Collaborative Research: Research: Developing reflexive engineers through accessing and characterizing implicit beliefs about the value of diverse perspectives in service-learning

解决社会上最大的问题，将需要工程师和非工程师的投入，他们拥有不同的背景和思维方式。一个好的工程师必须知道技术是如何运作的，但更重要的是，技术可能会如何影响人和社会。这意味着工程学教师需要让他们的学生做好与他人良好合作的准备，并尊重他们的想法。为了让工程学教师知道如何最好地帮助他们的学生，本项目将进行这项研究，以探索当工程学学生在社区中合作解决问题时，他们对非工程师的看法。这将通过1)调查不同的方法来确定工科学生对不是工程师的人的看法，2)将学生的信念划分为允许探索趋势的类别，3)与学生、社区合作伙伴和教师团队合作，就学生如何更多地了解自己进行头脑风暴。这将有助于让未来的专业工程师变得更好，向学生展示尊重和珍视他们的想法的重要性。这项研究研究的目标是确保社会成员不会因为工程师的想法或信念而经历负面影响。其目的是确保工程师所做的帮助社会的工作不会无意中伤害社区或不公平地对待与他们不同的人。这项研究将帮助工科教师更多地了解他们的学生对非工程师的看法，这可以帮助他们以一种真正使工程工作通过改善工程师解决问题的方式造福于整个社会的方式进行教学。由于工科学生的职业社会化通常会培养出这样一种信念，即工程师解决问题的科学方法优于其他思维方式，所以工程教育为学生提供明确的机会来反思并学习批评这种信念，这一过程被称为反身性，这一点很重要。本研究将对工程教育中有效获取内隐信念的定性方法产生新的认识。工程学中的服务学习为研究这一现象提供了一个教育背景，因为它明确地定位了学生在社会技术背景下与他人接触的位置。这个项目的首要目标是在所有工科学生中培养对不同观点的价值的平等主义信念，这个项目将调查服务学习的背景。在这一背景下，这个项目将产生知识，使工程教育者和其他研究人员，无论是在服务学习环境中还是在服务学习环境之外，通过对工程学学生持有的信念的细微差别的描述，来获得专业形成的重要结构。我们的分析将揭示工科学生的信念，这些信念既是普遍持有的，也是不同的，能够识别存在于广泛的工程文化层面的信念，以及可以被理解为学生生活经验的隐含结果的信念。最后，该项目的协作调查部分将就如何将这些隐含的信念模式用作加强服务性学习的投入提出建议。这是一个有意义的贡献，因为它可以为服务学习经验的程序化实施提供信息，并作为开发教学工具的证据，这些工具通过促进工程学生的反思能力来支持增强服务学习课程。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。

Solving society’s biggest problems, will require input from engineers and non-engineers, who have different backgrounds and ways of thinking. A good engineer must know how technology works but even more importantly, how technology might affect people and society. This means that engineering faculty need to prepare their students for working well with others and to respect their ideas. In order for engineering faculty to know how to best help their students, this project will conduct this research study to explore what engineering students believe about non-engineers when they are working together to solve problems in a community. This will be accomplished by 1) investigating different ways of determining what engineering students believe about those who are not engineers, 2) grouping students’ beliefs into categories that allow exploration of trends, and 3) working together with a team of students, community partners, and teachers to brainstorm ideas on how students can learn more about themselves. This will help make future professional engineers better, by showing students the importance of treating those who are not engineers with respect and valuing their ideas. The goal of this research study is to make sure that members of society do not experience negative impacts because of what engineers think or believe. The intent is to ensure that the work engineers do to help society is not unintentionally hurting communities or treating people who are different from them unfairly. This research will help engineering faculty learn more about what their students believe about non-engineers, which can help them teach in a way that truly makes engineering work benefit all of society by improving the way engineers solve problems.Since the professional socialization of engineering students commonly fosters the belief that engineers’ scientific approaches to problem solving are superior to other ways of thinking, it is important that engineering education provides students with explicit opportunities to reflect on, and learn to be critical of, such beliefs, a process known as reflexivity. This research will produce new knowledge on qualitative methods for effectively accessing implicit beliefs in engineering education. Service-learning in engineering provides an educational context to investigate this phenomenon as it explicitly positions students to engage with others in socio-technical contexts. With an overarching goal of fostering egalitarian beliefs about the value of diverse perspectives in all engineering students, this project will investigate the context of service-learning. Within this context, this project will produce knowledge that enables engineering educators and other researchers, both in and out of service-learning contexts, to access important constructs of professional formation through the contribution of a nuanced characterization of the beliefs held by engineering students. Our analysis will reveal the beliefs for engineering students that are both 1) commonly held, and 2) varied, enabling the identification of beliefs that exist at a broad, cultural level in engineering as well as beliefs that can be understood as implicit outcomes of students’ lived experiences. Lastly, the collaborative inquiry component of this project will produce recommendations for how these implicit belief patterns can be used as inputs for enhancing service-learning. This is a meaningful contribution in that it can inform the programmatic implementation of service-learning experiences and serve as evidence for the development of instructional tools that support enhancing service-learning curricula through promoting reflexivity in engineering students.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.