BRIDGES AND PROBLEM SOLVING

Swedish Engineering Students Conceptions of Engineering in 2007

Mattias Wiggberg

Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

Peter Dalenius

Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

Keywords:

CS-engineering.

Abstract:

Swedish engineering students’ conceptions of engineering is investigated by a large nation-wide study in ten

Swedish higher education institutions. Based on data from surveys and interviews, categories and top-lists, a

picture of students conceptions of engineering is presented.

Students’ conceptions of engineering, are somewhat divergent, but dealing with problems and their solutions

and creativity are identiﬁed as core concepts. The survey data is in general more varied and deals with some-

what different kinds of terms. When explicitly asking for ﬁve engineering terms, as in the survey, a broader

picture arises including terms, or concepts, denoting how students think of engineering and work in a more

personal way. For example, words like hard work, stressful, challenging, interesting, and fun are used. On

the other hand, it seems like the interviewed students tried to give more general answers that were not always

connected to their personal experiences.

Knowledge on students’ conceptions of engineering is essential for practitioners in engineering education. By

information on students’ conceptions, the teaching can approach students at their particular mindset of the en-

gineering ﬁeld. Program managers with responsibility for design of engineering programs would also beneﬁt

using information on students’ conceptions of engineering. Courses could be motivated and contextualized in

order to connect with the students. Recruitment ofﬁcers would also have an easier time marketing why people

should chose the engineering track.

1 INTRODUCTION

Engineering education in Sweden faces several chal-

lenges today. New groups of students are entering

higher education (Furusten and Lundh, 2007) which

challenges both the design of education and the ped-

agogical methods. In addition, the number of ap-

plicants to engineering programs has decreased dur-

ing recent years (Inkinen et al., 2007). At the same

time, several stakeholders see an increasing need for

engineers (Maury, 2004; Kungl. Ingenjörsvetenskap-

sakademien, 2003).

The gap between the growing need for engineers

and the shrinking group of applicants raises several

questions. What do students think of engineering ed-

ucation, why do they choose to enter an academic en-

gineering program and what makes them ﬁnish their

studies? To explore questions regarding why students

enter engineering programs, it is interesting to know

what conceptionsofengineering Swedishengineering

students have. Thus, the aim of this study is to ﬁnd

and describe what conceptions of engineering educa-

tion Swedish engineering students have in 2007.

Finding out what conceptions of engineering the

students have requires a huge investment in data col-

lection. Our empirical data comes from the na-

tionwide Stepping Stones project, organized by CE-

TUSS

. The Stepping Stones project was a unique

data collection experience where researchers from ten

Swedish higher education institutions were collabo-

rating and gathered data from more than 500 students.

The the article is organized as follows. An intro-

duction to the area is given through a literature review

presenting material relevant to the current study. The

data collection framework Stepping Stones is pre-

www.cetuss.se

Wiggberg M. and Dalenius P. (2009).

BRIDGES AND PROBLEM SOLVING - Swedish Engineering Students Conceptions of Engineering in 2007.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 5-12

DOI: 10.5220/0001862500050012

 SciTePress

sented followed by a section presenting and explain-

ing the method used. Some key results from the anal-

ysis are then given and discussed. Finally, conclu-

sions are drawn and directions and further work are

suggested.

2 RELATED WORK

There is a growing body of literature on college stu-

dents’ understanding of engineering and engineering

practice. The conception of engineering among stu-

dent populations promises to be an important aspect,

since it is likely that it contributes to knowledge on

motivation among engineering students and perhaps

the reluctance to undertake an engineering education.

(Mosborg et al., 2005) studied what advanced

practicing engineers ranked as key concepts of de-

sign activities in engineering. Among other results,

problem formulationand communicationwere ranked

highest, while building was ranked among the least

important activities. Creativity was ranked as neither

important nor unimportant.

The (Extraordinary Women Engineers Coalition,

2005) reports from the Extraordinary Women Engi-

neers project, a national US initiative that targets the

question ’Why are academically prepared girls not

considering or enrolling in engineering degree pro-

grams?’. Using online focus groups, in-person fo-

cus groups and online surveys they primarily targeted

high school girls to learn about what they think about

engineering, their career motivators and inﬂuences,

and received and desired information about engineer-

ing. Findings from the study show that engineering

is perceived to be a male ﬁeld. The high school girls

would like their jobs to be fun and at the same time

they would like to make a difference. High salary and

ﬂexibility are also important. Finally, they want to get

information on how identiﬁed important career moti-

vators can be met by choosing the engineering track.

This is not recognized to be the case at the moment

(Extraordinary Women Engineers Coalition, 2005).

Conceptions of engineering of engineering stu-

dents at the senior level have been investigated at the

Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching at the

University of Washington. In a word-association task

technical knowledge was more recognized than issues

such as communication, multidisciplinary teams, and

global and societal context issues (Turns et al., 2000).

(Goel and Sharda, 2004) had both engineering stu-

dents and professional engineers rank a list of activity

verbs. Students were asked to sort the words accord-

ing to how well they thought the activities increased

their learning, engineers according to the activities’

perceived importance for students. Words expressing

activities that require higher order cognition (e.g. an-

alyze, design) were ranked high in both groups. An-

other group of students rated the same words accord-

ing to their frequency of use in teaching. Among the

top words in this ranking, most concerned simpler

activities (e.g. calculate, explain). Goel and Sharda

draws the conclusion that while students and profes-

sional engineers agree on which activities an engi-

neering education should focus upon, in reality the

educational programs do not foster creativity, innova-

tion and critical thinking enough.

(Loui, 2005) reports from a study where stu-

dents in a course in Engineering Ethics were asked

for the characteristics of an ideal professional engi-

neer. Their answers fell into four categories: techni-

cal competence, interpersonal skills, work ethic and

moral standards. Typical responses in the ﬁrst cate-

gory included creativity, innovation, solve problems

and scientiﬁc knowledge.

We believe that the body of literature in this

could become more complete by adding studies aimed

at identifying students’ conceptions of engineering.

This is especially true for Sweden and Europe, and

this is where our study ﬁts in.

3 THE STEPPING STONES

INITIATIVE

The Stepping Stones project is an extensive multi-

researcher, multi-institutional study which aims to

contribute in the area of engineering education re-

search. The Stepping Stones project investigates how

students and academic staff perceive engineering in

Sweden and in Swedish education. The Stepping

Stones study is situated uniquely in Swedish edu-

cation and allows for exploration of a Swedish per-

spective on conceptions of engineering. The Step-

ping Stones project was based on a model of research

capacity-building previously utilized in the USA and

Australia (Fincher and Tenenberg, 2006).

The Stepping Stones data collection consisted of

four tasks, two of which are used by this study. A web

based survey, a critical incident interview, a photo

elicitation interview, and a concept map task (Novak,

1998) were carried out using the explanogram tech-

nique (Pears et al., 2003). One aim with these dif-

ferent data collection approaches was to produce both

quantitativeand qualitative data with the intent to pro-

vide a basis for triangulation of data as a means to

improve the quality of the results. Another impor-

tant aspect was that by using different data collection

methods we could get a richer data set. In the study

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

reported in this article, where we want to acquire in-

formation about students’ conceptions of engineering,

we used two parts of the Stepping Stones data: inter-

views and survey responses.

4 METHOD

4.1 Data Collection

During 2006 and 2007, data was gathered by a

web-based survey and through interviews from ten

Swedish institutions. Students from different engi-

neering programs where asked to ﬁll out the survey

and to participate in an interview session. Some stu-

dents participated in both an interview and a survey,

while others participated in only one of them.

The web based survey was adapted from the Aca-

demic Pathway Study(APS) survey(Eris et al., 2005).

The survey consists of questions about factors that

may be of importance in engineering. Examples of

such factors include skills, identity, and education.

The survey has been used in many institutional

contexts in the U.S. and has been analyzed for its va-

lidity (Eris et al., 2005). The survey was adapted to

a Swedish context. Words were changed to Swedish

equivalents, background questions not making sense

in a Swedish context were removed and some new

questions added. A pilot run of the modiﬁed sur-

vey was trialled prior to the full scale survey (Adams

et al., 2007).

Nationwide, 521 students ﬁlled out the survey and

94 students participated in the interview session. The

student cohort represented both freshmen and more

senior students. The sample investigated corresponds

to approximately 1.5 % and 0.3 % respectively of the

total number of students in Swedish engineering pro-

grams autumn 2006 (SCB, 2006).

The participating students were widespread

among different engineering disciplines, and in total

21 different engineering disciplines

were involved

in the study.

For this study, we used only a small part of the em-

pirical data from the Stepping Stones project, namely

Aerospace eng., bio-inspired and agricultural eng.,

biomedical engineering, chemical eng. (and chemistry),

civil eng., computer eng., computer science, electrical eng.

(and micro-electronics), geological eng., information tech-

nology, materials science and eng., mathematics, mechan-

ical eng., interaction design, software eng., physics (and

technical physics), systems in technology and society, en-

ergy eng., industrial economics, construction eng., other

(less than 5 respondents in total, for example cognitive sci-

ence and transport and logistics).

answers to 2 interview questions and answers to 1 sur-

vey questions, and the analysis was divided into two

different threads. The ﬁrst thread concerneddata from

the interviews. Here the interviewee’s own words and

conceptions about “real” engineering were analyzed.

The second thread of analysis concerned the concep-

tions of engineering displayed in the surveys. Word

frequencies and categories, or sets with similar con-

cepts, are identiﬁed and reported.

4.2 Analysis of Answers from

Interviews

Qualitative data used in this analysis was collected ex-

clusively from the critical incident interviews. The

critical incident interview starts with questions re-

calling a speciﬁc experience from the interviewee’s

past. A number of questions are then posed, aimed

at revealing more information about the experience as

well as its meaning for the interviewee. Critical inci-

dent interviews have previously been used by (Flana-

gan, 1954), (Klein et al., 1989), and (Klein, 1999).

A semi structured interview approach was used to

elaborate on the answers given. Thus the interview

began with a set of speciﬁc questions followed by op-

portunities for the researcher to probe or follow-up on

responses from the participants (Kvale, 1997, p. 117).

The Stepping Stones interview script contained,

among others, two different questions regarding con-

ceptions of engineering at different points in the inter-

view:

1. In a few words, what would you say real engineer-

ing is?

2. After everything we have talked about, what

would you say engineering is for you?

In order to get as broad answers as possible to

the question of conceptions of engineering, we have

taken answers to questions 1 and 2 together as one

data source, except in one particular case where we

focus on the impact of the interview. As these ques-

tions appeared at the start and towards the end of the

interview, conceptions of engineering recalled during

the interviews are collected.

The answers to the two questions analyzed were

extracted from the transcripts and a simple categoriza-

tion of the transcripts followed. The method was in-

spired by qualitative text analysis, which is a standard

method for analyzing text systematically, although

the concept is used to describe a wide set of meth-

ods (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005). The general aim

with qualitative content analysis is to “provide know-

ledge and understanding of the phenomenon under

study” (Downe-Wamboldt, 1992). Qualitative con-

BRIDGES AND PROBLEM SOLVING - Swedish Engineering Students Conceptions of Engineering in 2007

tent analysis is therefore more involved than merely

counting word frequencies in a text (Weber, 1990).

Qualitative content analysis has earlier been used in

similar projects, for instance (Dolde and Götz, 1995)

and (Eckerdal, 2006). Among many others (Mayring,

2000) has described qualitative content analysis and

especially inductive category development, which is

the method of ﬁnding categories that we have used in

this study.

By analyzing the transcripts in a systematic man-

ner, forming tentative categories centred on the re-

search question of conceptions of engineering and re-

vising them within a feedback loop, we deducted a set

of well deﬁned categories describing experiences of

the phenomenon. No quantitative aspects where con-

sidered. Revision of categories in the feedback loop

included testing the validity of categories and deﬁni-

tions by applying the tentative categories to the data.

Categories were also merged and divided up during

the analysis. Another researcher then veriﬁed the cat-

egories by the same procedure. The same categoriz-

ing process was used for question 2 and after some

discussion, we found that the same categories as in

question 1 also held for responses to question 2.

4.3 Analysis of Survey Answers

For this study, we have chosen to focus on one par-

ticular survey question dealing more explicitly with

conceptions of engineering:

1. In the space provided, list 5 terms you would use

to describe “engineering”.

Based on the responses provided, we cleaned the data

and translated answers given in Swedish to English.

Following this, the approximately 1400 answers were

clustered in order to make the grouping easier. Terms

with close semantically meaning were ﬁrst put to-

gether. For example ’solving problems’ was grouped

with ’problem solving’, ’creativeness’ with ’creativ-

ity’ etc.

This process of clustering and grouping the terms

was performed by one of the authors and veriﬁed by

the other.

5 EMPIRICAL RESULTS

In this section, we present empirical results from the

survey and the interviews.

5.1 Engineering Terms from the Survey

The most frequently stated engineering terms from

the survey are presented in table 1. Since the survey

question did not offer any ﬁxed terms to chose be-

tween, the number of different terms is huge. Hence,

only terms with an occurrence of 1 percent or more,

i.e. there being at least 14 listings of the term, are in-

cluded in the table.

The terms stated by the participant in the sur-

vey, describe many different aspects of engineering.

Personal aspects, open minded, stubbornness and re-

spected, descriptions of the everyday life of an engi-

neer, frustrating, individual work and time consum-

ing are present side by side with terms describing the

aim with engineering, for instance constructing, in-

ventions and developing.

Problem Solving is by far the most common term

used to describe engineering with more than twice as

many occurrences as the runner up creativity. Among

the top words, most are abstract descriptions general

aspects of engineering. There are also a number of

words describing the everyday work from a more per-

sonal perspective: interesting, hard work, fun, high

salary and challenging.

Mathematics is ranked as third, but accounts for

only 4.8% of the whole set. Apart from that, there are

few occurrences of academic subjects, physics with

1.1% being the second most common word of that

category. Words describing engineering processes

include developing (4.1%), analysis (1.9%) and de-

signing (1.1%). Aspects of engineering work include

team work (2.5%), project work (1.3%) and leader-

ship (1.4%).

5.2 Answers from Interviews

The categorization of answers to the interview ques-

tions is presented in table 2. The percentages indicate

how many of the participants’ answers matched each

category. The differences between the top three cate-

gories are small, but the span between the top and the

bottom is large enough to justify comparisons.

Problem solving (cateogory A) is the most com-

mon concept and it is discussed by more than one

third of all participants. It is closely followed by cate-

gory B that includes concepts related to construction,

e.g. building physical objects, and category C includ-

ing development and improvement.

The impact of engineering on society is also im-

portant and this aspect is discussed by 31% of the par-

ticipants. Related to this is the answer in category

E stating that engineering is about being innovative,

thinking for the future and contributing with some-

thing never done before.

22% of the participants use different academic

subjects to describe engineering (e.g. maths, physics)

and 13% talk about the intellectual activities con-

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

Table 1: The most frequently stated engineering terms in

the survey. Presented as percentages of all stated terms in

the current set.

Engineering term Mentioned (%)

problem solving 12.5

creativity 5.5

math 4.8

developing 4.1

inventions 3.1

technical 2.8

team work 2.5

research 2.3

hard work 2.2

interesting 2.0

fun 2.0

analysis 1.9

calculation 1.9

constructing 1.6

important 1.5

leadership 1.4

project work 1.3

science 1.3

computers 1.2

thinking 1.1

physics 1.1

designing 1.1

high salary 1.0

challenging 1.0

(other) 38.8

nected to engineering. Teamwork is the least frequent

category. Only 9% of the participants discuss team-

work in connection with engineering.

6 DISCUSSION

The results from the survey and the interviews gives

us two ways of pinpointing students’ conceptions of

engineering, and these two angles both support and

complement each other.

To some extent, the words from the survey and the

answers from the interviews paint the same picture.

Problem solving stands out as the most important as-

pect of engineering, being at the top of both lists. It is

also possible to ﬁnd terms from the survey that match

each of the other categories from the interview. Cat-

egories B and C relate to construction and develop-

ment. Both of these terms are found in the survey, but

not as frequently as in the interviews. On the other

hand, innovation and creativity (category E and F) are

the second and ﬁfth terms in the survey list, which is

much higher than in the interviews. Overall, all of the

aspects of engineering covered by the interviews are

also present in the survey, even if the relative impor-

tance is different.

A categorization, like the one performed on the

interview transcripts, of the terms from the survey

would be difﬁcult to perform since the survey terms

have no context. While the categories from the inter-

views give us a richer, more cohesive view, the terms

from the survey complement this view.

The terms from the survey (table 1) differ in level

of detail compared to the categories from the inter-

views (table 2). The survey data is in general more

varied and deals with somewhat different kinds of

terms. When explicitly asking for ﬁve engineering

terms, as in the survey, a broader picture arises includ-

ing terms, or concepts, denoting how students think of

engineering and work in a more personal way. For ex-

ample, words like hard work, stressful, challenging,

interesting, and fun are used. On the other hand, it

seems like the interviewed students tried to give more

general answers that were not always connected to

their personal experiences.

Another interesting observation is that academic

subjects, like mathematics and physics, do not appear

in any of the top positions. Even though mathematics

is third in the list of terms from the survey, it repre-

sents only ﬁve percent of the terms, and the second

highest ranked subject, physics, represents only one

percent. In the interviews, the category including aca-

demic courses is the seventh most frequent category

of a total of ten. We believe that this tells us some-

thing about the contrast between the subjects that con-

stitute an engineering education and the application of

these to engineering problems. According to our re-

sults, students value the latter aspect higher.

The results from (Mosborg et al., 2005) on key

concepts recognized by advanced engineers, partially

supports our ﬁndings. Problem formulation, in our

study problem solving, is ranked high in our study

as well as in (Mosborg et al., 2005). Creativity is

ranked as neither important nor unimportant in (Mos-

borg et al., 2005), but in our ﬁndings the picture

looks somewhat different. Our participants rank cre-

ativity rather high, both in the survey and the inter-

views, which seems to indicate that engineering stu-

dents connect engineering with creativity to a larger

degree than professional engineers.

In (Turns et al., 2000) technical knowledge was

ranked higher than concepts like communication,

multidisciplinary teams, and global and social issues.

Our ﬁndings, especially from the interviews, show

the same pattern for teamwork (category J). This is

the lowest ranked category in the interviews and, al-

though in the top twenty list of terms from the survey,

it represents only 2.5% of the terms. At the same time

BRIDGES AND PROBLEM SOLVING - Swedish Engineering Students Conceptions of Engineering in 2007

Table 2: Categorization of answers to interview question 1 and 2, and frequencies of answers.

Category Description Typical words used Percentage

A solve problems solve problems 36

B realizing concrete products construct, implement, building, realizing,

physical things, hands-on

C improving something that already exists develop, improve, optimize 34

D social impact of engineering activities changing society, ease everyday life, impact

on human beings

E contributing with something qualitatively

new

innovation, new ideas, thinking for the fu-

ture, something not built before

F being creative and explorative create, design, discover, explore, put things

together

G static knowledge connected to engineering knowledge, mathematics, technology, natural

science, physics

H intellectual activities thinking, curious, understanding, challenges 13

I engineering can be a lot of things complexity, many things 11

J teamwork teamwork, working together, collaborate 9

our results for category D, social impact of engineer-

ing, show a contrast to (Turns et al., 2000), where in

our ﬁndings technical knowledge does not stand out

as being among the most important aspects. Some of

these differences might be attributed to the different

educational systems.

The career motivators that (Extraordinary Women

Engineers Coalition, 2005) found among high school

girls matches several of the most frequent terms from

the survey, e.g. fun, important, and high salary. Even

though these words are generic, this indicates a great

potential for broadening the recruitment to engineer-

ing programs. As stated by (Extraordinary Women

Engineers Coalition, 2005), one of the problems is

that it is hard for high school girls to see that their

motivators can be met by choosing engineering.

7 CONCLUSION AND FURTHER

WORK

Swedish engineering students see themselves as cre-

ative problem solvers. This factis important. Cur-

riculum designers should consider to use the concept

of problem solving more when designing curricula.

They feel that engineering has both a general and ab-

stract side, as well as a real, physical manifestation.

We believe that we have a good picture of stu-

dents’ conceptions of engineering, but it would be

even more interesting to compare this with the views

of professional engineers. (Goel and Sharda, 2004)

indicates that students and engineers use the same

words to describe how to study engineering, but what

about the engineering profession? Will the students’

views change when they graduate and start working

as engineers? With answers to these questions, engi-

neering programs could be adapted to better prepare

students for the engineering profession.

(Loui, 2005) concludes that students get their

views of engineering professionalism from relatives

and friends. It would be interesting to investigate

where Swedish students get their conceptions. The

Stepping Stones survey data is a rich source that can

be analyzed as a step towards an understanding of

where Swedish students receive their conceptions. It

would also be valuable to see how students are af-

fected by education and to what extent engineering in

general is actually discussed in engineering programs.

How do the teachers and educational institutions ad-

dress engineering? Is there a premeditated way of

communicating what engineering is, and if so - what

does it look like?

The reported results are presented with a low level

of detail regarding different engineering disciplines.

An interesting thread to follow up is what the concep-

tions look like in different engineering disciplines. Is

there, for instance, a difference between engineering

physics and information technology? If so, what does

that difference mean in terms of recruitment?

No studies on conceptions of engineering among

active engineers have been performed recently in

Sweden, and producing one would be a valid contri-

bution to the ﬁeld. A comparison between the stu-

dents’ engineering conceptions and active engineers’

would be useful in order to determine if there is a dif-

ference.

Knowledge on students’ conceptions of engineer-

ing is essential for practitioners in engineering ed-

ucation. By information on students’ conceptions,

the teaching can approach students at their particu-

lar mindset of the engineering ﬁeld. Program man-

agers with responsibility for design of engineering

programswould also beneﬁt using information on stu-

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

dents’ conceptions of engineering. Courses could be

motivated and contextualized in order to connect with

the students. Recruitment ofﬁcers would also have an

easier time marketing why people should chose the

engineering track.

Another question, regarding the implication of the

conceptions, is if there exists a right, or more efﬁcient,

way to view engineering in the education? If there is

one, how could we adjust educational planning in or-

der to achieve this more efﬁcient view?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Stepping Stones project was funded by Rådet för

högre utbildning (the Swedish Council for Renewal of

Higher Education) and by Myndigheten för nätverk

och samarbete inom högre utbildning (the Swedish

Agency for Networks and Cooperation in Higher Ed-

ucation). It was run within the context of the Na-

tionellt ämnesdidaktiskt Centrum för Teknikutbild-

ning i Studenternas Sammanhang project (CeTUSS),

a national centre for pedagogicaldevelopment intech-

nology education in a societal and student oriented

context. Any opinions, ﬁndings and conclusions or

recommendations expressed in this material are those

of the authors and do not necessarily reﬂect the views

of any of these supporting bodies.

We thank the Stepping Stones participants for

their contributions to this project. In addition to

the authors, those are Robin Adams, Jürgen Börstler,

Jonas Boustedt, Gunilla Eken, Sally Fincher, Tim

Heyer, Andreas Jacobsson, Vanja Lindberg, Bengt

Molin, Jan-Erik Moström, and Arnold Pears.

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