Compilation:

Aligning Engineering Education with Engineering Practice

Excerpts (1997 – 2017):

(1) Bucciarelli, L.L., & Kuhn, S. (1997). “Engineering Education and Engineering Practice: Improving the
Fit” from Between Science and Craft (Ch. 9). Cornell University Press.
(2) Trevelyan, J. (2010). “Reconstructing Engineering from Practice.” Engineering Studies, 2(3), 175-195.
(3) Stevens, R., Johri, A., & O’Connor, K. (2014). “Professional Engineering Work” from Cambridge
Handbook of Engineering Education Research (Ch. 7). Cambridge University Press.
(4) Passow, H.J., & Passow, C.H. (2017). “What Competencies Should Undergraduate Engineering
Programs Emphasize? A Systematic Review.” Journal of Engineering Education, 106(3), 475-526.
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1. Excerpts from:
Bucciarelli & Kuhn (1997). “Engineering Education and Engineering Practice: Improving the Fit”

We claim that there exists a serious mismatch between the content, structure, aims, and values of
contemporary engineering education and what is required of individuals who wish to function effectively
as engineers in today's industrial settings. The view, widely held by the public, that engineering is
fundamentally the application of scientific principles, is also deeply ingrained in the engineering
curriculum. This way of thinking overlooks a significant component of an engineer's actual work, and
perpetuates the mismatch between engineering education and what engineers actually do – a
mismatch that is growing more pronounced as political and economic changes alter the practice of
engineering.

To demonstrate the mismatch, we will begin by describing the essential features of engineering
practice: a difficult challenge because the variety of tasks engineers perform is diverse…

With this in mind, we first describe what we see as the common features of engineering that reach
across all modes and specialties. We distinguish two quite different worlds which an engineer must
inhabit: what we call the object world on the one hand, and a larger, process-oriented social world on
the other. Each has a different character, and the ability to operate effectively in both worlds is essential
to effectiveness as a practicing engineer.

Work within “Object Worlds”

We use the term "object world" to refer to the domain of thought and action within which participants
in engineering design move and live when working on any specific aspect or subsystem of the design.
Work in the object world consists of intensive interaction with the object of the design, with its physical
properties, and with how its properties and behaviors might be embodied in order to accomplish the
design objectives…For example, an engineer responsible for sizing the structural members of an
automobile chassis will describe the "behavior" of the object in terms of its stiffness in torsion and
bending, will express concern about the levels of stress it can "tolerate" before failure might ensue, and
will construct an analysis to predict the structure's resonant frequencies and modes of vibration when
fully loaded and traversing a bumpy road. (The bumpy road must also be realistically constructed.) The
engineer's scenario about the "performance" of the frame can take a dramatic form depending, in part,
upon the audience. The object seems to come alive in these descriptions, to develop a character all its
own. These scenarios are continually modified and elaborated upon, sometimes made concrete in
actual bits and pieces of prototypical hardware, sometimes recoded as mathematical models to be
experimented with on the computer. Within object worlds the engineer tests, modifies, and strengthens
the scenario and, in the process, assimilates and appropriates the object.

Although work in the object world requires creativity, the goal of storytelling and scenario making is
to achieve closure: to arrive at a design that is fixed, repeatable, stable, unambiguous, and internally
consistent. Object world thinking is thinking about the rigidly deterministic. It is here, working within
object worlds, that science-based engineering carries full weight. Object world thought is also abstract
and reductionist. Models of the sort prevalent in science, and in large part derived from science, are
essential to work within object worlds. The engineer's ability to abstract from a concrete situation, to
see an object as a collection of forces, or as a network of ideal current generators connected in series
and in parallel, is key to problem solving and to managing complexity within object worlds. One of the
crucial skills conveyed as part of disciplinary training is the ability to look at a design, or at a collection
of objects, and to see them as an abstraction to which scientific principles can be applied.

Object world work is, perhaps above all else, work within a discipline. Disciplinary tools are brought
to bear, and the designer's thought process is likely to be inaccessible to people from other disciplines.
While there is diversity even among members of the same discipline, they will share a common
language and a common set of tools – that is, a way of seeing – which allows them to work together on
a shared problem at a level of detail available only to those who are members of the discipline.

Design is a Social Process

Work within object worlds is but one aspect of the design process. For design to proceed, engineers
must exchange and negotiate with others in the firm, since a complete design is rarely the province of a
single individual. Here, different object worlds intersect, generating a sort of work whose character is
fundamentally social and process oriented. There is no overarching instrumental strategy for
reconciling and synthesizing diverse design interests. To put the claim in the strongest terms, we say
that design is a social process. This claim goes against the conventional wisdom that engineering is
fundamentally scientific. While essential to design, science is not determinate of the design or of the
design process. Of course scientific laws constrain an engineer's options, but constraints imposed by
nature are only some among the many constraints binding the engineering design process. Other kinds
of technical constraints are more clearly human constructs: the interface conditions among different
subsystems, worked out by the project leader in consultation with the chief people on his or her team,
are an example.

The performance requirements set by a customer are also constructs subject to change. It is not
difficult to lay out performance specifications at the beginning of the design process; indeed, it is
standard practice. What is difficult – probably impossible – is retaining those specifications without an
ongoing process of modification, clarification, negotiation and joint meaning-making. Specifications that
seem clear at the outset are stretched and challenged by the design process itself; ambiguities,
incompletenesses, confusions, and contradictions are uncovered as part of the process of discovery
that is design.
...
So too is the division of labor in design ambiguous. Where you place the boundaries between
different design tasks, how you break up the entire job of design, is no straightforward process. The
boundaries of subsystems – and thus, to an extent, of object worlds – are themselves ambiguous and
subject to negotiation and renegotiation. Nor are boundaries absolute even when this negotiation has
taken place, since coordination and overlap are both necessary and unavoidable.

Design is thus best seen as a process of communication, negotiation, and consensus-building. No

one person, no one object world, dictates the form of the design or even knows the design in its totality.

Like engineering itself, engineering education is a complex and diverse domain. To demonstrate the
mismatch between engineering practice and the structure and content of an engineer's training, we will
focus on engineering education's obsession with science.

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 The Ideology of Engineering as Science Centered
...
As students move into their engineering studies in their second and third years…the emphasis
remains on abstract theory and on the utility of mathematics in developing theory’s implications for
particular problems and phenomena, except now these have a more "engineering" cast. The student
continues to spend most of his or her waking hours struggling to find the answers to the weekly
assigned problems. There are some differences: the organization of knowledge, still instrumental and
reductionist in character, takes a different form. Mathematics and science are used to explain
structures, electrical circuits, fluids, computation, and materials. Students now study the workings of
cantilever beams, internal combustion engines, photovoltaic cells, and aircraft control systems – in
departments labeled mechanical, electrical, civil, and the like…Coursework of this sort provides the
student with little, if any, opportunity to develop his or her creative talents independently or to gain the
self-confidence prerequisite to leadership. It does prepare students to work skillfully in the object world,
but it can prevent them from developing capabilities needed for the process world. As important as
scientific knowledge is to becoming an engineer, the problem assigning/problem solving experience is
one that is authoritarian, single-minded and constraining – and potentially debilitating. It is also an
approach that places great emphasis on individual accomplishment qua individual; the whole grading
system is based on individual achievement and prowess relative to that of peers.
...
Of course there is more to engineering students' experience than basic and engineering science
courses. Students do laboratory work (though this too might have a narrow cast), probably do some
design work, and certainly must study the humanities and/or social sciences. Furthermore, much of
student learning and growth might occur on a summer job, while working in an undergraduate research
position, or while engaged in other less formal student activities. Still, the prevailing ethos of the
student's experience is science.
...
Improving Engineering Education
The engineering curriculum we have described is well tuned for object world activity, we claim, but
this, while still necessary, is no longer sufficient for effective practice within a changing environment
where the social process of design is ever more critical…
Because engineering is a social process, value laden and not determined by technical considerations
alone, engineering education must move away from its almost total focus on individual intellectual
mastery of disjointed, narrow content. It must prepare students to flourish in an indeterminate,
ambiguous environment in which object world skills are necessary but insufficient. The shift in corporate
settings toward decentralized, highly competitive, resource limited engineering practice makes this
change in engineering education all the more imperative. Graduates must still be competent, even
excellent, at work in the object world, but they must also be able to convey their ideas to others, work as
a team, compete for scarce corporate resources, and see the big picture as well as their own place in it.

An engineering education must prepare students for the complexities and uncertainties of
engineering practice, break with the protective shielding afforded by the single-answer problem,
challenge them to critically reflect upon what they are doing, and require them to articulate and defend
their choices of method and designs in front of their peers and faculty. It should, in sum, recognize and
teach students how to deal with context. Students need not become experts in organizational behavior,
the negotiation of different interests, or the value systems, abilities and aspirations of the consumers
and users of their designs, but they must come to see the legitimacy of the kinds of questions and
problems that arise in these areas and their central, not peripheral, place in engineering practice.
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2. Excerpts from:
Trevelyan (2010). “Reconstructing Engineering from Practice”

[ Summarizing an interview-based study of practicing engineers ]

The main finding of the analysis, though only part of the evidence has been presented here, is that
we can better understand engineering practice by reframing engineering as human social performance.
We can only fully understand engineering if we understand how people think, feel, act, and interact as
they perform it.
...
None of the participants in our study worked on their own. To a greater or lesser extent, they all
relied on interactions with other people: their practice was based on distributed expertise. The first
stage of analysis revealed that engineering involves a large number of different aspects of practice and
specialized knowledge, most of it unwritten, developed through years of practice, and difficult to transfer
to others. Learning about all of this is beyond any one individual in a typical project timeframe or even a
working lifetime: there is not enough time. Instead, engineers informally coordinate with other people so
they willingly and conscientiously contribute their expertise. Sometimes they start with little or no
overlapping understanding, so helping others to learn and learning from others is always a part of
practice.
...
Many engineers would view human performance and social interactions as ‘management issues.’
However, the analysis demonstrates that technical knowledge is distributed in the minds of participants.
This observation helps to explain why even novice engineers in roles labeled with a predominantly
‘technical’ focus (as opposed to more senior engineers with a more explicit managerial component in
their work) devote an average 60% of their time to direct social interactions. This proportion does not
seem to vary with experience level. The social discourse required to enact distributed expertise is
necessarily technical, and therefore these interactions cannot be regarded as ‘non-technical.’
Distribution of expertise is an engineering issue, albeit currently outside what many practitioners might
acknowledge as engineering.

Reframing engineering as human performance enables engineering studies researchers, currently

sitting at the curricular margins of a discipline dominated by technical discourse, to relocate their
research and its significance to the core of engineering practice. Nearly all the practitioners who have
taken part in the study reported that the major failures they have encountered resulted from failures in
human interactions rather than errors in the underlying written technical knowledge. There may be
interesting research here: how do the social interactions required to support distributed expertise and
the languages through which they occur shape the expertise and influence predictable applications?
There are grounds for optimism that a much stronger research focus on the way that people think, feel,
act, and interact in engineering could lead to significant improvements in practice.
...
One aim of this article has been to present a clearer understanding of engineering than any of our
participants were able to articulate on their own. For students in particular, the description
demonstrates the central place of people in engineering practice and the necessity to understand how
human interactions influence technical results. Students need to understand that communication in
engineering practice is more than simply providing technical information to other people. Developing
cooperative social relationships and shaping the perceptions of other people are equally significant.

Engineering educators can also make use of this description of engineering practice that, like
education itself, focuses attention on people. Education is a social process just as much as engineering
practice. The traditional reaction from engineering faculty faced with the need to pay more attention to
professional skills has been to point out the already over-crowded curriculum. However, improving the
understanding of how people learn has close parallels with understanding the way that people interact
in engineering practice. Therefore, we may be able to improve understanding of both and also improve

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technical learning at the same time. There has been an increased emphasis on scholarship in
engineering education over the last decade and research methods appropriate for these studies are
equally appropriate for understanding how people interact in engineering practice.

The observation that expertise is distributed among the participants in an engineering performance
places social interactions at the core of the technical practice of engineering. This observation ties
social skills to the technical identity most valued by engineers and also provides educators and
students with a strong motivation to elevate the importance of social skills needed for effective
collaboration. Developing the social interaction skills to handle distributed expertise in the classroom
could provide engineering students and faculty with a means to improve learning of both the technical –
with which most young engineers strongly identify themselves – and the social at the same time in a
common framework. At the same time, an understanding of how distributed expertise enables practice
might help engineers to see the social as a central part of their technical identity, and revalue many
aspects of practice that rely on distributed expertise.
_____________________

3. Excerpts from:
Stevens, Johri, & O’Connor (2014). “Professional Engineering Work”

Research by Faulkner (2008) points directly to some identity issues for engineers who must navigate
a dominant technicist ideology of engineering (i.e., what we have been referring to as technical
rationality) and the reality of professional practice as heterogeneous engineering. Despite the fact that
all engineers do heterogeneous work and most recognize this work (though not using the term
"heterogeneous"), there is a tendency among engineers to define "real" engineering in terms of the
technical, "nuts and bolts," scientific and mathematical labor, and to locate the social aspects of
heterogeneous engineering outside of "real" engineering (cf. Trevelyan, 2010).
...
There is a plausible tension in the way a student and a professional might understand herself if most
students' educations are based predominantly on coming to understand engineering as a form of
technical rationality. Such an understanding of engineering could result in both direct and indirect
tensions in understandings of one's work as an early career professional. Directly, new engineers who
identify strongly enough with a model of technical rationality are likely to struggle to understand
themselves as engineers if they perceive a dilution of "pure" engineering work by what they perceive as
"nonengineering" work in professional practice (Eisenhart & Finkel, i998; Faulkner, 2008; Korte et al.,
2008).
...
A possible indirect effect of the curricular model of technical rationality is that it may prevent
students from developing other imagined futures as engineers; engineers do varied kinds of work and
play varied roles in their professional work lives but this diversity of experience is hardly visible in
undergraduate education (Eisenhart & Finkel, 1998; Foor, Walden, & Trytten, 2008; Steering
Committee of the National Engineering Education Research Colloquies, 2006). Whether the tensions
are direct or indirect, what is obscured for students are the identity elements of heterogeneous
engineering practice that engineering students typically do not see or learn to value as central - those
related to communication, coordination, organizing, and persuasion amidst people and technical
practices and objects.
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4. Excerpts from:
Passow & Passow (2017). “What Competencies Should Undergraduate Engineering Programs
Emphasize? A Systematic Review”

[ Summarizing a systematic review of research on engineering practice ]