Measuring change over time in sociotechnical thinking: A survey/validation model for sociotechnical habits of mind

Abstract

Practicing engineers need to be able to balance the complex interplays that exist between the social and technical dimensions of contextualized, open-ended problems. Engineers often engage in problem definition while interacting with non-engineering stakeholders. Yet in undergraduate engineering education, engineering course work often emphasizes the technical at the expense of the social, and rarely provides students the opportunity to solve open-ended problems. This paper describes the rationale and process for developing an instrument to measuring students' perspective changes in sociotechnical thinking. That instrument is motivated by research that examines the importance of embedding sociotechnical thinking, or the interplay between relevant social and technical factors in the problem to be solved, into the engineering curriculum.