Engineering Students’ Empathy Development through Service Learning: Quantitative Results From a Technical Communication Course

Abstract

A recent longitudinal study found a disturbing trend of decreased public engagement in engineering students during and even after their formal engineering studies. The first step towards public engagement is empathizing with them to understand their needs. In engineering education, empathy is an area of growing interest with suggestions that a broad cultural shift in engineering education is necessary to facilitate increased discussion of empathy and public welfare. One popular technique for engaging students with real-world problems that affect the community is service learning. The service-learning project under study required engineering students in a technical communication course to work with a not-for-profit client and adapt a technical document for a particular target audience the client was trying to reach. Students were tested using the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire and the public engagement survey to see what effect service learning and humanities-based instruction has on students' engagement with public welfare. This paper will examine the aggregated quantitative results of these surveys to explore the role of empathy and engineering education and technical communication.

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