Journal of Civil Engineering Education

Interdisciplinary learning plays a vital role in the education fields of the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. According to the literature, interdisciplinary studies are often associated with professional skills that should be taught in engineering and other similar programs. Knowing the attributes and scope of interdisciplinary learning concurrent with the technical requirements of an engineering degree can set students up for career success. The objective of this study was to establish a deeper understanding of the importance of interdisciplinary education in AEC students’ success after they enter the industry. Knowing what makes students successful professionals, the link between interdisciplinary domains, technical domains, and metrics for professional success can offer guidance for programs to consider. To accomplish this, this body of work deployed a series of surveys investigating the importance of interdisciplinary learning on the graduates’ success to companies who hire architectural engineering students. Success was characterized through teamwork, satisfied clients, successful technical solutions, happy people, and making a positive contribution to the industry. The results show that both technical depth and breadth were valued in parallel with experience working in teams and collaborative environments to achieve these areas of success. Furthermore, this paper discusses and suggests curricular relationships between interdisciplinary factors, such as breadth of knowledge and collaboration within the Architectural Engineering Department, in promoting the success of graduates in the AEC industry.

In civil engineering and construction management programs, student collaboration is important for their skill building, but its relationship with student engagement remains elusive. This study explored this relationship by examining the structure and characteristics of student collaboration networks. The results underscore the significance of network diameter as a measure of reachability and communication efficiency—a smaller network diameter correlates with higher engagement and suggests quicker and more-efficient communication in student groups. Structural leadership is a key factor in reducing the diameter and enhancing engagement by facilitating communication and bridging structural connection holes. In this context, structural leaders (i.e., brokers or bridges) who connect disconnected students or isolates play a more crucial role than opinion leaders (i.e., influencers or hubs) who connect a larger number of students. The findings reflect the ideal dual-lead pattern observed in industry collaborations, in which a technical lead makes critical decisions and a coordination lead diffuses knowledge and information. Strategies to nurture structural leadership are proposed, including leveraging virtual collaboration such as BIM and focusing on cultivating bridge students and their coordination skills. Additionally, the study highlights the benefits of small-world networks and reveals that demographic factors have little significant influence on engagement levels.

Framing engineering problems in a humanitarian engineering (HE) context has been shown to have a significant impact on students’ learning, particularly how they understand and articulate sociotechnical design considerations. However, no studies explicitly compared differences in sociotechnical thinking for different forms of engineering context. This study aims to investigate the differences in sociotechnical thinking for students presented with an engineering design challenge framed within two different country contexts. First-year ($n=59$) and third-year ($n=58$) students participated in a one-hour design challenge activity. Students were asked to consider the factors that they thought would influence the design of a retaining wall in a randomly assigned context: Mississippi [non-human engineering (HE)] or Bangladesh (HE). Students’ responses were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed to evaluate differences in the sociotechnical factors mentioned by the two groups. Study results showed that HE context students identified significantly more ($p=0.005$) sociotechnical design factors and have a more nuanced understanding of how the wall impacted people. HE students also focused more on deficiencies in the local capacity in the Bangladesh context, whereas non-HE context students focused more on physical design considerations and alternative uses of the wall. Study results provide evidence for the strong gains in sociotechnical thinking facilitated by HE context integration, even during a short activity. They also imply that HE context integration must be done thoughtfully to teach students how implicit biases and cultural racism impede effective engineering design.

Minoritized students in civil engineering frequently experience subtle negative attitudes or biases based on their race and gender. These subtle attitudes and biases are known as microaggressions and are reasons for low self-efficacy and retention in civil engineering. Previous studies demonstrated the prevalence of microaggressions in engineering education but did not focus on capturing the spaces where these microaggressions occur, nor do they identify the targets and perpetrators within civil engineering education. The current paper proposes to answer: (1) Where do microaggressions occur in civil engineering and non–civil engineering programs? (2) Who are the targets and perpetrators of microaggressions? The study included 328 surveys with minoritized undergraduate engineering students who identified as Black, Latinx, Asian, and white females. We found that the most significant spaces where microaggressions occurred were classrooms and labs, followed by office hours, study groups, and internships. In terms of perpetrators, peers and teaching assistants were the most significant, followed by faculty. When comparing targets of microaggressions across race groups, white females reported experiencing microaggressions less frequently than Black, Latinx, and Asian students. Black students reported experiencing microaggressions more frequently than any other groups included in the study. Finally, there was no difference observed among civil engineering and non–civil engineering students or the two institutions (a historically Black college and university and a primarily white institution). These findings provide recommendations for targeting better policies to address microaggressions in civil engineering education.