Browsing by Author "Fila, Nicholas D."

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Applying Phenomenography to Develop a Comprehensive Understanding of Ethics in Engineering Practice
    (IEEE, 2018-10) Brightman, Andrew O.; Fila, Nicholas D.; Hess, Justin L.; Kerr, Alison J.; Kim, Dayoung; Loui, Michael C.; Zoltowski, Carla B.; Technology and Leadership Communication, School of Engineering and Technology
    This Work-in-Progress Research paper describes (1) the contemporary research space on ethics education in engineering; (2) our long-term research plan; (3) the theoretical underpinnings of Phase 1 of our research plan (phenomenography); and (4) the design and developmental process of a phenomenographic interview protocol to explore engineers' experiences with ethics. Ethical behavior is a complex phenomenon that is complicated by the institutional and cultural contexts in which it occurs. Engineers also have varied roles and often work in a myriad of capacities that influence their experiences with and understanding of ethics in practice. We are using phenomenography, a qualitative research approach, to explore and categorize the ways engineers experience and understand ethical engineering practice. Specifically, phenomenography will allow us to systematically investigate the range and complexity of ways that engineers experience ethics in professional practice in the health products industry. Phenomenographic data will be obtained through a specialized type of semi-structured interview. Here we introduce the design of our interview protocol and its four sections: Background, Experience, Conceptual, and Summative. We also describe our iterative process for framing questions throughout each section.
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    Critical Incidents in Engineering Students’ Development of More Comprehensive Ways of Experiencing Innovation
    (ASEE, 2018) Fila, Nicholas D.; Hess, Justin L.; Engineering Technology, School of Engineering and Technology
    Numerous approaches to fostering the innovative behaviors of engineering students have been explored, especially in recent years. However, often these studies are not qualitatively grounded in students’ experiences with being or becoming innovative. This study builds upon a previous study that explored differences in the ways engineering students understood and experienced innovation. While that study utilized phenomenography to explore variation in ways of experiencing innovation, here we used the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to explore how engineering students progressed from less to more comprehensive ways of experiencing innovation. We sought to address the research question, “What aspects of engineering students’ innovative experiences were critical to the development of their ways of experiencing innovation?” Through CIT, we identified 122 critical incidents among the 16 interviews. We used thematic analysis to group these incidents into four categories including: Learning From Immersion; Learning from Failure; Learning from Others; and Learning from Success. These categories encapsulated two to three incident types each, or 10 incident types total. Further, we utilized these findings to begin exploring trends in how critical incidents informed participants’ ways of experiencing innovation. These findings detail critical components for promoting students’ novel or more comprehensive understandings of and approaches to innovation that other engineering educators may utilize in their own courses and curricula. Importantly, we recognize that these findings are not exhaustive and future studies are to elaborate upon the the incident types and trend identified herein, and explore if and how these findings can translate to other populations.
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    The Development and Growth of Empathy Among Engineering Students
    (American Society for Engineering Education, 2016-06) Hess, Justin L.; Fila, Nicholas D.; Department of Engineering Technology, School of Engineering and Technology
    Discourse on empathy is growing globally, as is its focus within the engineering community. In the context of engineering, scholars have depicted this interpersonal phenomenon as a necessary skill for effectively communicating, a core component of ethical reasoning, and a key technique for designing to meet the needs of users. However, literature regarding its development within engineering is rather limited, and the literature that does exist is disconnected. Even literature outside of engineering tends to focus on childhood development as opposed to adult development. While the developmental literature may tend to focus on earlier ages (likely because this is when an individual most rapidly develops), the endeavor of empathic growth and development need not be abandoned within post-secondary education. Rather, it indicates that we lack an understanding of the ideal means for empathic development later in one’s life. Given the growing emphasis on the necessity of empathy to thrive as an engineer, engineering educators need to understand the constellation of existing tools and pedagogical techniques to foster empathy within the engineering curriculum. This synthesis piece highlights a variety of educational contexts and pedagogical techniques, each of which we posit are equally salient and mutually supportive for the development of engineering students’ empathic skills, abilities, or dispositions. We draw from literature from a wide variety of fields, including counselling, psychology, moral philosophy, psychotherapy, neuropsychology, and engineering education. In sum, we describe five educational contexts and a myriad of techniques that we posit, when used effectively and spread across engineering curricula, will be effective means towards the development of empathy among engineering students.
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    Exploring the Manifestation of Empathy within Engineering Innovation and Design
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2016-04-08) Hess, Justin L.; Fila, Nicholas D.
    The study of empathy within engineering has potential to improve the education of innovative and ethically-oriented engineers through the application of empathically guided engineering principles and processes. However, the collective understanding of the role of empathy within engineering is minimal. Hence, the purpose of these two distinct but aligned investigations was to understand how empathy manifests within engineering innovation and design. Specifically, the guiding research questions included: (1) “In what manner and to what extent does empathy predict innovative behavioral tendencies?”, and (2) “In what ways does empathy manifest throughout design?” To address the initial research question, we disseminated two validated instruments (the Interpersonal Reactivity Index and Innovative Behavioral Scales) to students at a large, public, mid-western university. Through a series of multiple regression analyses, we found that that cognitive empathy types (e.g., perspective-taking, fantasy) showed a more pronounced relationship with innovative behavioral tendencies (e.g., questioning, idea networking, observation) than affective empathy types (e.g., empathic concern, personal distress). To address the second research question, we thematically analyzed a set of critical events extracted from eight videos that featured nine STEM students who participated in a three-week service-learning course at the same university. Through our analysis, we found four categories with 12 underlying themes that represented empathically-oriented techniques designers utilized to develop a user-centric empathic understanding, as well as how these informed their creation of design criteria, outcomes, and evaluation of those outcomes. Taken together, the results indicate that empathy is highly salient within engineering, and that emphasizing this salience throughout engineering programs and organizations could change broader societal images to demonstrate the relevance of empathy to engineering design and innovation. This, in turn, might attract more empathically-inclined students to engineering.
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    In Their Shoes: Student Perspectives on the Connection between Empathy and Engineering
    (American Society for Engineering Education, 2016-06) Fila, Nicholas D.; Hess, Justin L.; Department of Engineering Technology, School of Engineering and Technology
    An emerging body of literature highlights the importance of empathy within engineering work and explores how engineering students develop empathic tendencies and utilize empathy during design. Still, more work needs to be done to better understand how engineering students conceptualize empathy and view its role in engineering practice. In this study, we explored the ways that engineering students described empathy and its application in their engineering work. Eight engineering students, from seven different majors, ranging from juniors to doctoral students, participated semi-structured interviews focused on the empathy in engineering. Using thematic analysis we uncovered three themes revealing engineering students’ experiences with empathy (understanding others’ feelings, important in everyday life, generally outside the scope of engineering) and four themes revealing potential uses for empathy in engineering work (team settings, problem contextualization, human-centered design, individual inspiration). These findings highlight existing gaps between students’ perceptions of empathy as compared to scholarly literature on the role of empathy in engineering and perceptions from engineering faculty and practicing engineers. For example, the themes demonstrate that students are often generally aware of certain potential uses of empathy, but have not necessarily experienced those uses in their own work. In the paper, we discuss how alignments or discrepancies between student and expert perceptions both extend our notions of the role of empathy in engineering and identify areas that can be better supported through engineering instruction.