An official website of the United States government
Engineers play an important role in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations, which aim to provide a more sustainable environment for future generations. Through design thinking, creativity, and innovation, sustainable engineering solutions can be developed. Future engineers need to acquire skills in their engineering curriculum to feel equipped to address sustainable design challenges in their career. This paper focuses on the impact of perceived design thinking traits and active learning strategies in design courses to increase senior engineering students’ motivation to engage in energy sustainability in their career. A national survey was distributed to senior engineering students in the United States (n = 4364). The survey asked students about their motivation to engage in sustainable design, their perceived design thinking traits (i.e., integrative feedback, collaboration), and if they experienced active learning strategies in design courses (i.e., learning by doing). The results highlight that higher perceived design thinking ability increases senior engineering students’ interests in designing solutions related to energy sustainability. Active learning experiences positively influence senior engineering students’ interests in designing solutions related to energy sustainability. These findings show the importance of teaching design thinking in engineering courses to empower future engineers to address sustainable challenges through design and innovation.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on July 31, 2026
On the Symbiotic Nature of Science, Sustainability, and Systems Thinking in an Introductory Course on Sustainability Concepts
Scientific literacy, quantitative reasoning, and systems thinking are essential components of developing a sustainability mindset, and thus should form elements of introductory courses in sustainability so that such mindsets can be cultivated from the outset of a student’s academic studies, particularly in engineering. Evaluations of selected student works (9 respondents from 22 enrolled students) suggest that engineering students demonstrate proficiency with well-structured quantitative tasks, and can make progress adopting mathematical habits such as using estimations and orders of magnitued. However, as the activities become less well prescribed, such as in drawing concept maps to illustrate earth systems cycles, they are not as fluent. Further, they need to develop more practice to do “higher order” tasks, such as interpreting, cross-checking, citing, and communicating ideas outside of their routine. Nevertheless, the results of self-assessment surveys are generally positive and suggest that students are aware of the need to achieve the higher order expectations. The results open questions indicate that several students authentically learned scientific and quantitative elements of sustainability thinking, as evidenced by their articulation of specific details about systems thinking, chemistry, and mathematics.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2150461
- PAR ID:
- 10613409
- Publisher / Repository:
- 2025 American Society for Engineering Educaiton Annual Conference & Exposition
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- sustinability mindset, quantitative literacy, systems thinking
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Assessing and applying students’ understanding of the scientific practices and crosscutting conceptsnull (Ed.)The Model-Evidence-Link (MEL) and build-a MEL (baMEL) tasks are designed to engage students in scientific practices, including argumentation and critical thinking. We designed a rubric for teachers to assess the various practices and skills students use while completing a MEL or baMEL, based on several NGSS Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs) and Cross Cutting Concepts (CCCs). When applying this rubric, we suggest that teachers only focus on student performance with respect to one SEP or CCC each time they implement a MEL or baMEL. We also developed a transfer task to ascertain how well students are able to perform MEL-related thinking skills, such as identifying a scientific model and alternative (but non-scientific) models, lines of evidence, and plausibility of knowledge claims, in a grade appropriate scientific journal article. The near-transfer activity can help teachers gauge how well students apply their MEL/baMEL skills and can improve students’ scientific literacy.more » « less
-
In the spring of 2021, the University of San Diego’s Department of Integrated Engineering taught the course, “Integrated Approach to Energy”, the second offering of a new required course, to nine second-year engineering students. The sociotechnical course covered modern energy concepts, with an emphasis on renewable energies and sustainability, and it exposed the students to other ways of being, knowing, and doing that deviated from the dominant masculine Western White colonial discourse. Following the course completion, we interviewed five students by using a semistructured protocol to explore how they perceived of and communicated about engineers and engineering. We sought to identify the takeaways from their course exposure to sustainability and the sociotechnical paradigm, which were central to the course. The findings suggest that the students were beginning to form sociotechnical descriptions, and that they were still developing their understanding and perceptions of engineers and engineering. Moreover, we observed that they were still wrestling with how best to integrate sustainability into those perceptions. There was an a-la-carte feel to the students’ conceptualizations of sustainability as it related to engineering, as in, “you can ‘do’ sustainability with engineering, but do not have to”. We argue that engineering students likely need these pedagogical paradigms (sociotechnical engineering and sustainability) woven through the entirety of their engineering courses if they are to fully accept and integrate them into their own constructs about engineers and engineering.more » « less
-
This paper presents an experiential learning pedagogy that teaches undergraduate business management information systems students hands-on AI skills through the lens of sustainability. The learning modules aim to empower undergraduate business students to gain interest and confidence in AI knowledge, skills, and careers, to sharpen their higher order thinking abilities, and to help them gain a deeper understanding of sustainability issues. Students learn AI through developing chatbots that address pressing sustainability issues within their own communities. Results of the pilot study indicate that students have increased self-efficacy in AI, more positive attitudes towards AI learning and AI-related careers, enhanced sustainability awareness, and more confidence in their ability to innovate.more » « less
-
Despite increased calls for the need for more diverse engineers and significant efforts to “move the needle,” the composition of students, especially women, earning bachelor’s degrees in engineering has not significantly changed over the past three decades. Prior research by Klotz and colleagues (2014) showed that sustainability as a topic in engineering education is a potentially positive way to increase women’s interest in STEM at the transition from high school to college. Additionally, sustainability has increasingly become a more prevalent topic in engineering as the need for global solutions that address the environmental, social, and economic aspects of sustainability have become more pressing. However, few studies have examined students’ sustainability related career for upper-level engineering students. This time point is a critical one as students are transitioning from college to industry or other careers where they may be positioned to solve some of these pressing problems. In this work, we answer the question, “What differences exist between men and women’s attitudes about sustainability in upper-level engineering courses?” in order to better understand how sustainability topics may promote women’s interest in and desire to address these needs in their future careers. We used pilot data from the CLIMATE survey given to 228 junior and senior civil, environmental, and mechanical engineering students at a large East Coast research institution. This survey included questions about students’ career goals, college experiences, beliefs about engineering, and demographic information. The students surveyed included 62 third-year students, 96 fourth-year students, 29 fifth-year students, and one sixth-year student. In order to compare our results of upper-level students’ attitudes about sustainability, we asked the same questions as the previous study focused on first-year engineering students, “Which of these topics, if any, do you hope to directly address in your career?” The list of topics included energy (supply or demand), climate change, environmental degradation, water supply, terrorism and war, opportunities for future generations, food availability, disease, poverty and distribution of resources, and opportunities for women and/or minorities. As the answer to this question was binary, either “Yes,” or “No,” Pearson’s Chi-squared test with Yates’ continuity correction was performed on each topic for this question, comparing men and women’s answers. We found that women are significantly more likely to want to address water supply, food availability, and opportunities for woman and/or minorities in their careers than their male peers. Conversely, men were significantly more likely to want to address energy and terrorism and war in their careers than their female peers. Our results begin to help us understand the particular differences that men and women, even far along in their undergraduate engineering careers, may have in their desire to address certain sustainability outcomes in their careers. This work begins to let us understand certain topics and pathways that may support women in engineering as well as provides comparisons to prior work on early career undergraduate students. Our future work will include looking at particular student experiences in and out of the classroom to understand how these sustainability outcome expectations develop.more » « less
