An Exploration of the Role of Student Empathy in Engineering Design Education

Abstract

Empathy has proven to be an effective driver of design outcomes and thus is seen as a core constituent of engineering design education. While prior work underscores the importance of empathy in engineering and identifies the factors that lead students to become more empathic, many studies have relied on students’ perceptions of their empathy and most were conducted as controlled experimental workshops. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to identify the factors that contribute to the building of empathy in engineering design education and the subsequent impact on engineering design performance. This goal will be achieved through a longitudinal study with 103 first-year engineering design students that aims to identify the predictive validity of students’ individual traits on empathy development, understand the relationship between empathy development and students’ design performance, and investigate the impact of team composition on team empathy development. The results from this research would better inform pedagogical interventions aimed at empathy development.