Collaborative Research: NLI: Design and Development: Priming to support sustainable design and sustainable mindsets

As the challenges facing society grow more complex, there is increasing recognition that engineers must consider the social and environmental contexts in which their designs will exist in order to create effective products, systems, and processes that improve global quality of life. However, engineering curricula often focuses on technical design performance, and provides little training on how to contend with environmental and social challenges, leaving students ill-equipped to address sustainability during design.

In support of the goals of the Research in the Formation of Engineers program and the NSF-Lemelson Initiative on Environmental and Social Sustainability in Engineering Education, this project will advance understanding of how to support engineering students’ preparation to address global social and environmental sustainability challenges. Specifically, this project will advance an educational approach focusing on priming that is adaptable across engineering disciplines and provide guidance for implementing this approach to emphasize social and environmental sustainability within existing curricula.

Emphasizing sustainability in engineering may particularly resonate with and attract individuals from diverse and minoritized backgrounds drawn to impact-driven careers. Therefore, this project can contribute to creating a more inclusive and representative engineering workforce ready to address socio-technical challenges.

This project seeks to develop, implement, and assess priming as an educational strategy to promote sustainable engineering design decision-making at the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona. Priming involves explicitly introducing a stimulus to students and assessing the subsequent response. Multiple prior studies have shown that, in controlled behavioral experiments, explicit sustainability language in problem statements results in better consideration of sustainability in subsequent design decisions.

Additionally, supporting students to handle socio-technical complexity has been hypothesized to promote students’ sense of engineering agency beliefs and self efficacy. In this project, the team will adopt a mixed methods approach to investigate (1) the potential to scale up priming for sustainability as an engineering education intervention, (2) the role of priming on sustainable engineering design, (3) the impact of priming for sustainability on engineering students’ sense of agency and self-efficacy.

The project team will first develop a range of sustainability primes, informed by literature on engineering education, design processes, sustainability competencies, and the Lemelson Initiative’s Engineering for One Planet Framework. The team will work with engineering instructors to tailor sustainability primes to fit within existing engineering design courses.

The team will then collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data from engineering instructors and students. Initial interviews will be conducted with engineering instructors to understand their course and learning objectives and to identify opportunities to add in priming for sustainability. After the sustainability primes are implemented in courses, interviews will be conducted with students to garner detailed insights into their experiences in engineering design courses, the design artifacts resulting from their courses, and their perspectives on sustainability in engineering.

Validated tools will be used to measure changes in students’ engineering agency beliefs and self-efficacy before and after exposure to sustainability primes within engineering design courses. The expected contributions of this project are multifaceted. First, this project will provide guidance for integrating sustainability into engineering design curricula, resulting in more sustainable design decisions by students.

By creating adaptable priming interventions, the project will provide a scalable tool for use by a broad set of engineering institutions and disciplines to emphasize sustainability. Additionally, this project will enhance an understanding of the relationship between students' beliefs about their engineering capabilities and their consideration of sustainability, an area that remains underexplored yet has potential to broaden participation and retention in engineering education.

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.