Collaborative Research: Implementing a Humanities-driven Curriculum to Address Critical Thinking and Empathy Skills Among Engineering Students

This project aims to serve the national interest by understanding how critical thinking and empathetic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals can be developed through a humanities-driven curricular and problem-solving approach. The need for empathetic and critical thinking skills for STEM professionals is becoming readily evident due to the increased complexities of our society.

Continued globalization through technologies means that the work of scientists and engineers has a greater impact on how we interact and communicate than ever before and presents a new set of grand challenges for our society. Traditionally, the humanities have played little to no role in STEM education even though critical thinking and empathy skills are hallmarks of a humanities education.

There are, however, natural links that may enrich STEM students' educational experience and better prepare them to meet these grand challenges. This project will present science and engineering problem-solving within a humanities setting, an approach called humanities-driven STEM (HDSTEM). This approach will engage an interdisciplinary collaboration between humanities and engineering situated at two universities, Texas Tech University (TTU) and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).

With this collaboration, students will develop problem-solving skills that require them to empathize and think critically. Through the NSF IUSE:EHR Engaged Student Learning track, this work will meet the program's goal to seek transformative approaches to generating and using new knowledge about STEM teaching and learning to improve STEM education for undergraduate students.

This project will examine the effectiveness of two problem-solving assignments: typical problem-solving and empathy-embedded problem-solving within two-course designs: a HDSTEM design with team-taught Humanities and STEM faculty, and instruction by STEM faculty in an introductory engineering curriculum. Curriculum treatments will be compared across two universities, TTU and RIT.

While considering different faculty and instructors for this curriculum at the two institutions, the curriculum will be tied together through shared typical and empathy-embedded problem-solving assignments. The purpose of these treatments is to deepen STEM students' ability to empathize and think critically. At the same time, the project will examine which of the two implementation processes (i.e., HDSTEM curriculum and introductory engineering curriculum) performs better.

This study will use a mixed-methods approach to analyze data and results. Multiple sources of data will be collected, analyzed, and compared for triangulation. Comparisons will be made between the data collected at the beginning and end of the courses; the two course interventions will also be made.

Discourse and content analysis in conjunction with commonly used rubrics for critical thinking and empathy will measure and assess differences from the curriculum treatments. Results will show benefits in critical thinking and empathy from the HDSTEM environment. 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.