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A strong understanding of technical knowledge is necessary for all engineers, but understanding the context in which engineering work takes place is just as important. Engineering work impacts people, communities, and environments, and there is increasing recognition of the importance of preparing engineers to account for these sociocultural dimensions. The engineering curriculum needs to include both technical and sociocultural topics to prepare students as holistically competent engineers. A call for broader engineering skills is evident in ABET student outcomes, a few of which directly denote the importance of students’ ability to identify the ethical, cultural, and social impact engineers have on society. However, engineering education continues to underemphasize or omit entirely non-technical aspects of engineering practice. Technical knowledge persists as the central focus in engineering classes. Omitting sociocultural material in engineering classes can result in the development of future engineers whose designs further perpetuate social and systemic inequities, such as environmental pollution that affects vulnerable populations or inefficient designs that risk human lives. Additionally, emphasizing sociotechnical content in undergraduate engineering courses can help attract and retain a more diverse population of students who value socially relevant engineering work. A deep grounding in both technical and social skills and knowledge is particularly important in Industrial Engineering (IE), a field that focuses on analyzing data to improve systems and processes and which tends to focus more on human and business dimensions than many other engineering fields. Even so, there is little evidence to indicate that sociocultural skills and knowledge are taught in IE courses. Because the curricular focus of a field communicates to students what is and is not valued in the field, students who enter IE with a strong desire to advance social good may learn that such a goal is inconsistent with the field’s values and ultimately feel alienated or disinterested if social dimensions are not incorporated into their coursework. More insight is needed into the kinds of messages IE coursework sends about the nature of work in the field and the opportunities these courses provide for students to develop the sociotechnical knowledge and skills that are increasingly crucial in Industrial Engineering. In an effort to characterize how, if at all, core courses in IE facilitate students’ development of sociotechnical engineering skills, this research paper examines the general content of core IE courses at a predominantly white institution. This paper draws on data generated for a larger research study that leverages Holland et al.’s Figured Worlds framework to explore the messaging undergraduate engineering students receive in their classes around valued knowledge in their field. In this study, we draw on observation data leveraging recordings of seven required undergraduate courses in IE. We analyzed three randomly selected sessions from each course, with a total of 21 unique sessions observed. Our findings describe the practices that are and are not emphasized within and across required IE courses and the ways these practices are discussed. Our characterization of emphasized engineering practices provides an important foundation for understanding what is communicated to students about the nature of engineering work in their field, messaging which has substantial implications for the population of students who enter and persist in the field beyond their undergraduate studies. 

Engineers are called to play an important role in addressing the complex problems of our global society, such as climate change and global health care. In order to adequately address these complex problems, engineers must be able to identify and incorporate into their decision making relevant aspects of systems in which their work is contextualized, a skill often referred to as systems thinking. However, within engineering, research on systems thinking tends to emphasize the ability to recognize potentially relevant constituent elements and parts of an engineering problem, rather than how these constituent elements and parts are embedded in broader economic, sociocultural, and temporal contexts and how all of these must inform decision making about problems and solutions. Additionally, some elements of systems thinking, such as an awareness of a particular sociocultural context or the coordination of work among members of a cross-disciplinary team, are not always recognized as core engineering skills, which alienates those whose strengths and passions are related to, for example, engineering systems that consider and impact social change. Studies show that women and minorities, groups underrepresented within engineering, are drawn to engineering in part for its potential to address important social issues. Emphasizing the importance of systems thinking and developing a more comprehensive definition of systems thinking that includes both constituent parts and contextual elements of a system will help students recognize the relevance and value of these other elements of engineering work and support full participation in engineering by a diverse group of students. We provide an overview of our study, in which we are examining systems thinking across a range of expertise to develop a scenario-based assessment tool that educators and researchers can use to evaluate engineering students’ systems thinking competence. Consistent with the aforementioned need to define and study systems thinking in a comprehensive, inclusive manner, we begin with a definition of systems thinking as a holistic approach to problem solving in which linkages and interactions of the immediate work with constituent parts, the larger sociocultural context, and potential impacts over time are identified and incorporated into decision making. In our study, we seek to address two key questions: 1) How do engineers of different levels of education and experience approach problems that require systems thinking? and 2) How do different types of life, educational, and work experiences relate to individuals’ demonstrated level of expertise in solving systems thinking problems? Our study is comprised of three phases. The first two phases include a semi-structured interview with engineering students and professionals about their experiences solving a problem requiring systems thinking and a think-aloud interview in which participants are asked to talk through how they would approach a given engineering scenario and later reflect on the experiences that inform their thinking. Data from these two phases will be used to develop a written assessment tool, which we will test by administering the written instrument to undergraduate and graduate engineering students in our third study phase. Our paper describes our study design and framing and includes preliminary findings from the first phase of our study.