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The Improving Students’ Sociotechnical Literacy in Engineering project aims to integrate social justice topics with technical knowledge in a first-year engineering course. The approach involves redesigning an existing intro to computing course with justice-based activities, supported by an Equity Learning Assistant (ELA) program. This program trains upperclass students to facilitate in-class discussions on equity and social justice. The project targets improvements in students' critical sociotechnical literacy and engineering identity. Activities include analyzing ethically complex data sets and developing equity-focused projects, while encouraging students to integrate social, economic, and political dimensions into their engineering work. This initiative spans four years (one pilot year plus three NSF-funded iterations) and involves a multidisciplinary research team of engineers and education researchers.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Investigating How Social Justice Framing for Assessments Impacts Technical Learning
Multiple studies call for engineering education to integrate social justice into classroom instruction. Yet, there is uncertainty regarding whether integrating these social topics into engineering curriculum will support or detract from the learning of technical concepts. This study focuses on evaluating how reframing technical assessments to include social justice concepts impacts student learning and investigates how well students integrate social justice into engineering decision making. Using a within-subject design, in which students were exposed to both conditions (questions with and without social justice context), we evaluate how social justice framing impacts overall student learning of technical topics. Social justice prompts are added to homework questions, and we assess students’ demonstration of knowledge of original technical content of the course, as well as their ability to consider social justice implications of engineering design. In the earlier homework assignment, the experimental group showed a significant decrease in learning when technical concepts were framed to include social justice. As the students became more familiar with social justice considerations, their learning of technical concepts became comparable to that of students who did not have the social justice components in their assignment. Their evaluation of the social implications of technical decisions also improved. History: This paper has been accepted for the INFORMS Transactions on Education Special Issue on DEI in ORMS Classrooms. Funding: This work was supported by the Carnegie Mellon University’s Wimmer Faculty Fellowship and the National Science Foundation [Grant 2053856]. D. Nock also acknowledges support from the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, where she is an energy fellow.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2053856
- PAR ID:
- 10568277
- Publisher / Repository:
- INFORMS Transactions on Education
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- INFORMS Transactions on Education
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1532-0545
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 136 to 151
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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