Engineering education is increasingly looking to the liberal arts to broaden and diversify
preparation of students for professional careers. The present study involves an elective graduate environmental engineering course that incorporated the arts and humanities. The goal of the course was to develop engineers and technical professionals who would become both more appreciative of and better equipped to address technical, ethical, social, and cultural challenges in engineering through the development of critical and reflective thinking skills and reflective practice in their professional work. A reflective writing assignment was submitted by students following each of fourteen course topics in response to the following question: Reflect on how you might want to apply what you learned to your development as a professional and/or to your daily life. Student responses were classified by human coders using qualitative text analytic methods and their classifications were attempted to be learned by a simple machine classifier. The goal of this analysis was to identify and quantify students’ reflections on prospective behaviors that emerged through participation in the course. The analysis indicated that the primary focus of students’ responses was self-improvement, with additional themes involving reflection, teamwork, and improving the world. The results provide a glimpse into how
broadening and diversifying the curriculum might shape students’ thinking in directions that are more considerate of their contributions to their profession and society. In the discussion, we consider the findings from the human and machine assessments and suggest how incorporating AI machine methods into engineering provides new possibilities for engineering pedagogy.
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This content will become publicly available on June 23, 2025
Long-term impact of a semester-long multidisciplinary service-learning assignment in a fluid mechanics course.
Seventy-three students who enrolled in a senior-year level fluid mechanics course during
spring semesters from 2019-2022 were asked about their perceptions on the impact in their
professional preparation of a semester-long multidisciplinary service-learning assignment. This
paper evaluates their current perceived impact of the assignment (long-term impact) and whether
it might have changed from when they took the course (short-term impact). A survey was sent to
all former students who went through the course and participated in the assignment, with a
61.64% return rate. The survey included questions about how well they remembered the
assignment (some of the students were involved in it 4 years prior to completing this survey), the
relevance of the project in terms of their professional preparation, how it impacted their
collaboration skills, and whether their involvement affected their interest in participating in
engineering outreach activities. To determine how their perceived impact of the project on their
professional preparation has changed from when they took the class to now when they are
working professionals, we compare their recent responses to the responses in reflections they
completed while taking the course. The information gathered in the survey also provides a means
to evaluate the effectiveness of the project and identify areas for improvement, which has
implications for how similar projects might be designed and enacted in the future.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1908743
- PAR ID:
- 10537851
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland, Oregon
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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