Exploring How Empathy Manifests with/for Teammates in a Junior-Level Biomedical Engineering Course

Teamwork projects are a common feature of undergraduate and graduate engineering programs and improved collaboration skills is an expectation of ABET accredited programs. Thus, it is important to understand factors that contribute to the development of more effective collaboration skills among engineering students. We posit that empathy is critical to working in teams, but limited research has explored how students empathize with team members in engineering education contexts. This study focuses on team experiences in a design course wherein students engaged in a group of three to four members. Specifically, we address the research question, “How did empathy manifest with and for teammates in a junior-level biomedical engineering design course?” We conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 students. The interview primarily focused on students' empathy for users and a concerted focus on teamwork experiences was a sub-component of the protocol. In analysis, we extracted passages in which students mentioned, talked about, or described their experiences as a team member, including ways in which they or their team members potentially empathized with one another. Using these passages, we performed a thematic analysis to identify how unique empathy types manifested therein. We found that it was often a challenge to extract peer-to-peer empathy types. Rather, students tended to talk about elements of the team that fostered or promoted an empathic teamwork environment, or what we refer to as collective empathy. Thus, in this study, we apply the concept of collective empathy to the interview data and, using these findings, we consider its applicability to studying empathy in engineering. We hope that these findings will position the engineering education research community to identify strategies to better promote students' abilities and tendencies to empathize with and for members. Moreover, we hope that this work will provide a foundation for future research focused on how empathy can promote more effective engineering design teams.