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As the world becomes increasingly complicated, systems thinking continues to gain recognition as an important and necessary skill for future engineers. Systems thinking does not replace traditional technical skills required of engineers; rather, it provides a complementary skillset to help better navigate complex systems and their corresponding problems. The increasing complexity of U.S. industries demands that universities train and educate future engineers with systems-thinking skills to solve the range of interconnected problems companies may face. Many factors have the potentials to impact systems-thinking skills. This paper aims to identify the effects of potential impacting factors on the systems-thinking skillset. Current college engineering students were the target population of the study. Structural Equation Modeling was performed to quantify the relationship between systems-thinking skills and potential impacting factors. The results of this study indicated that employment status would affect the overall systems-thinking skills of the engineering students and the engineering students with outside job experience will score higher than students without outside job experience in the systems-thinking skills.
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Systems Thinking Assessments: Approaches That Examine Engagement in Systems Thinking
While systems engineers rely on systems thinking skills in their work, given the increasing complexity of modern engineering problems, engineers across disciplines need to be able to engage in systems thinking, including what we term comprehensive systems thinking. Due to the inherent complexity of systems thinking, and more specifically comprehensive systems thinking, it is not easy to know how well students (and practitioners) are learning and leveraging systems thinking approaches. Thus, engineering managers and educators can benefit from systems thinking assessments. A variety of systems thinking assessments exist that are relevant to engineers, including some focused on the demonstration of systems thinking knowledge or skills and others measuring attitudes, interests, or values related to systems thinking. Starting with a collection of systems thinking assessments from a systematic literature review conducted by our team, we analyzed in-depth those behavior-based assessments that included the creation of a visual representation and were open-ended, i.e., it did not presuppose or provide answers. The findings from this in-depth analysis of systems thinking behavior-based assessments identified 1) six visualization types that were leveraged, 2) dimensions of systems thinking that were assessed and 3) tensions between the affordances of different assessments. In addition, we consider the ways assessments can be used. For example, using assessments to provide feedback to students or using assessments to determine which students are meeting defined learning goals. We draw on our findings to highlight opportunities for future comprehensive systems thinking behavior-based assessment development.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1733665
- PAR ID:
- 10294025
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2021 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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