A case for the student researcher: Expanding the role of undergraduate research in the professional formation of engineers

This paper examines the role of social inquiry as a bridge between education and practice for undergraduate student researchers in engineering. Prior work has demonstrated the efficacy of undergraduate research (UR) as a tool to increase retention rates, particularly in STEM disciplines, and to encourage progression to graduate school. However, little work has been conducted on the role of UR in the development of professional skills for engineering students. Among such skills, the ability to work in complex socio-technical systems is a critical competency for professional engineers that is often under-addressed within a standard technical curriculum. In this paper, we used collaborative autoethnographic techniques to recall and reflect on three students’ UR experiences working with a methodological approach, SenseMaker, which is designed to investigate emergent patterns and behaviors in complex, social systems, such as the systems involved in educating engineers, as well as those systems that engineers work with on a daily basis. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we found that using autoethnographic techniques to individually recall and collaboratively write and make sense of UR experiences facilitated the construction of novel insights of both personal and broader significance. Second, we found that providing undergraduate engineering students with the opportunity to systematically inquire into a social system served as an intellectual bridge between their highly structured and theoretical core engineering courses and the complexity of engineering in practice. Third, inquiry into the specific system of engineering education, in which the students themselves are important participants, provided students with an opportunity to experience, first hand, the value of meaningfully engaging all participants in a system, as they will be required to do as engineers working with non-engineers in their future professional roles. All three of these contributions point to a potentially much broader role of UR in engineering education as a way to further enhance the holistic professional formation of engineers. Collaborative systems inquiry within engineering education research can be a small-scale laboratory that allows students to develop problem solving skills within complex systems, while the empowerment of student researchers to study and improve their own education systems can simultaneously yield innovative perspectives in research.