Improving Students’ Sociotechnical Literacy in Engineering

This project aims to serve the national interest by preparing engineering students to develop, analyze, produce, and assess engineering processes, products, and impacts through a lens of justice and equity. The project team will develop, study, and share a novel approach to integrating social justice topics alongside technical knowledge in a first-year engineering computation course.

In undergraduate engineering education, discussions about ethics in engineering practice are typically addressed in stand-alone courses, late in the course progression. This separation leads students to consider the technical and social aspects of engineering as separate and unequal, with technical content usually viewed as more important. To remove this technical-social divide, this project will bring social, economic, and political considerations into a technical first-year course, “Introduction to Computing in Engineering.” Course instructors, education researchers, and STEM diversity experts will redesign the course and develop new course materials that integrate topics of equity and justice in engineering and data science into readings, discussions, in-class exercises, and homework problems.

To assist course instructors in implementing this revised course content, a cohort of upper-level students will be hired and trained via a weekly seminar to facilitate in-class discussions and activities. Using surveys, classroom video recordings, and interviews, the project will study the effectiveness of this approach and iteratively revise the course content and implementation structure over three years.

Online resources will be created to distribute project materials to other engineering programs that are interested in adopting this approach.

This project will redesign an existing computing course around justice-based activities, supported by an Equity Learning Assistant (ELA) program that will train upper-level students to facilitate in-class discussions. Through the justice-based activities, students will learn the required computing technical skills by analyzing real, ethically complex data sets and working on personally meaningful equity-focused projects.

This approach will provide students with opportunities early in their education to practice integrating social, economic, and political dimensions into their engineering work. Each section of the redesigned course will be supported by two upper-level students who are part of the ELA program. The ELAs will participate in a weekly equity pedagogy seminar to learn about critical data science studies and related pedagogical approaches.

The project’s three-year mixed-methods research study will generate and disseminate evidence-based practices to develop undergraduates’ sociotechnical literacy and sense of belonging in engineering. In producing new knowledge around these practices, this project will cultivate pedagogical change through a process-oriented approach (ELAs) together with a product-oriented approach (the sociotechnical course redesign).

The project has potential benefits at both local and societal levels: the revised course and ELA seminar will directly benefit 600 first-year students and 30 ELAs; the development of the ELA Program will increase the School of Engineering’s capacity to transform engineering courses throughout the school to incorporate justice-based issues; the Tufts STEM Equity Group will provide the institutional infrastructure necessary to incorporate ethics and social justice in departments across Tufts’ multiple colleges and programs; and dissemination efforts will enable engineering programs across the U.S. to adopt this approach. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.

Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

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.