Teaching and assessing systems thinking in engineering

This paper presents research on undergraduate engineering students’ perceptions of their learning about systems thinking. Why is this important to engineering education? Engineering faculties across Australia are experiencing substantial pressure from industry, the professional body and their own institutions to contextualise and embed generic graduate attributes in undergraduate programs (Engineers Australia, 1996; Engineers Australia, 2006; King, 2008). Similar pressure to reorient engineering education is evident in many other quarters (ASCE 2004;RAE 2006; ABET 2007; IMechE 2007). Responding to this pressure is proving challenging in Australia with three inter-related problems evident in the Australian engineering education literature: Innovative teaching of graduate attributes tends to be isolated and short-lived; rigorous evaluation of impact on student learning is rare; and contextualisation of institutional graduate attributes statements tends to be limited (Carew et al., 2007). In Australia and internationally, greater discourse, research and development are needed to embed engineering design-relevant meta-attributes (eg. reflective practice, creativity, social justice, systems thinking) in undergraduate engineering. The focus of this paper and our research is the teaching, learning and assessment ofthe meta-attribute systems thinking.