Collaborative Research: Research: Assessing Empathic Formation in Engineering Design

Empathy is essential for identifying, designing for, and meeting user needs and can motivate engineers to meaningfully engage with and respond to diverse viewpoints and values. Thus, educators need tools for developing empathy in engineers. Yet, measuring empathy is challenging because it manifests uniquely in different contexts. To begin addressing the need for an engineering-specific measure of empathy, we developed and pilot-tested an assessment instrument. Our prior work suggested a need to improve how empathy is measured across all aspects of the design phases and to account for variation in empathy for distinct user groups. Thus, in this study, our primary objective is to refine this instrument and to ensure its validity, reliability, and fairness for assessing empathic formation in undergraduate engineering design across multiple contexts, design phases, and participants. We will integrate and account for these perspectives in the expansion of the instrument, thus ensuring that the instrument captures a diverse group of instructor perspectives and needs. Thus, this study will support a critical need for a valid tool for assessing empathy in engineering design. Empathy can provide the “spark of human concern for others,” thus bolstering efforts at integrating empathy into engineering curriculum and help students’ empathic growth with and for users. Thus, a measure of empathy can help students care, understand, and help users in need. In this study, we will iterate on an instrument for assessing empathy with a diverse group of engineering design instructors to identify potential refinements of the instrument needed to improve its alignment with their contexts, collect student data to ensure potential instrument refinements that accurately represent student experiences, and design a revised instrument that accounts for these novel insights. We will test the revised instrument for validity via the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data with a large sample of students. Finally, we will use the instrument to identify differences in empathic formation associated with various instructional design contexts and practices, thus generating new knowledge on best practices for promoting empathic formation in engineering design. Our team brings prior research in empathic design, distinct engineering backgrounds, and expertise in multiple research methodologies which will ensure research rigor and quality. Our collaborators are design educators and thus will help ensure the instrument is useful for engineering design courses across disciplines and across university sites. The advisory board includes experts in empathy, design, and psychometrics who will provide external evaluation and guidance to ensure that the instrument represents the state of the art of research on empathy in engineering design. By providing the community with this measure, we can facilitate the integration of empathy and assessment of empathy in engineering classroom contexts, which can positively impact the experience and retention of pro-socially motivated students in engineering programs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.