Engineering students are increasingly expected to work towards solving ‘wicked’ problems. Tacking such complexity can invoke a range of emotions and educators are increasingly required to support students in situations when they are confronted with uncertainty and value conflicts.

In this episode we speak to Johanna Lönngren, Associate Professor in Science and Engineering Education at Umeå University. Johanna is part of the Umeå Science Education Research (UmSER) group and focuses on the role of emotions in education for sustainable development, exploring how engineering students talk about, and collaboratively deal with, emotions when they work with complex sustainability problems.

Join Dr. Natalie Wint (University College London) and Prof. Neil Cooke (University of Birmingham) to learn more about the emotions that engineers experience when tacking complex and wicked problems

Timestamps

0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode

0.17 Podcast Intro

0.42 Experiences with student emotion from Natalie and Neil

3.45 Introduction to Johanna

8.23 University of Umeå

10.28 Wicked problems in engineering

15.08 Brining wicked problems into engineering education

19.15 Emotions in education

25.19 Emotion as social; implications for methodology

29.18 Emotions associated with wicked problems

32.18 Positioning theory

34.55 Emotional scaffolding

40.52 Studying and evaluating the use of emotional scaffolding

47.37 Techniques to help students deal with emotions associated with wicked problems

54.11 Supporting engineering educators in providing emotional scaffolding

56.54 Future work

1:00:40 Takeaways from Johanna

1:02: 18 Key takeaways from Natalie and Neil

Resources

https://wickedproblemsteaching.wordpress.com/.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03043797.2025.2474046?scroll=top&needAccess=true#d1e164

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Feedback and peer review is a key part of university life for both educators and students. Despite this, there are still gaps in our understanding how to best provide and make use of feedback. This episode features Ruth Fisher and Divya Naya, both from the University of New South Wales. We talk about the winner of the ‘Best Practice Paper’ at the SEFI 2025 Conference entitled “Using multistage peer reviews to provide feedback and improve student learning” which Ruth and Divya co-authored with Javier Videlo Mario and Shamim Aryampa.

Timestamps

0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode

0.27 Introduction to the episode

1.18 The context of the research

2.44 A summary of the work

3.40 The need for the work

6.20 How did the peer review process work?

10.00 How was the process evaluated?

12.37 Grading students' feedback

13.29 The main research questions

14.30 The findings

19.16 How did educators' feedback practice change?

21.06 The findings; educator reflections

24.28 Key takeaways

29.55 What's next?

Follow this link to read the full paper.

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Concerns for student mental health have grown over the last decade, particularly within engineering disciplines, which are often associated with heavy workloads and difficult assessment. There is subsequently an increasing need to understand the stressors that impact engineering students, and the ways in which we can support them to thrive.

In this episode we speak to Karin Jensen, an Assistant Professor and Faith Gacheru a first-year graduate student, both from the University of Michigan. Karin was awarded a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for her research on undergraduate mental health in engineering programs and recognized with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, awarded by US President Biden in January 2025, whilst Faith recently presented a poster entitled A Mixed-Methods Study to Support Undergraduate Engineering Student Well-Being at ASEE 2025.

Join Dr. Natalie Wint (University College London) and Prof. Neil Cooke (University of Birmingham) to learn about stressors within engineering education and ways by which to encourage help-seeking behaviour.

Timestamps

0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode

0.23 Podcast Intro

0.45 Experiences with student mental health from Natalie and Neil

2.32 Introduction to Karin and Faith

7.06 University of Michigan

9.38 Key definitions, terminology and use of language

15.27 How concerns regarding mental health have changed

20.11 The role of engineering culture

24.21 Making changes at different levels of the system

26.32 Measuring stress and identifying stressors within engineering education

34.53 How do educators perceive mental health concerns

36.51 Thriving

38.09 Translating finding into teaching practices

47.21 How is the research being used to support other educators

48.29 Staff mental health

51.09 Future work

52.33 Takeaways from Karin and Faith

55.54 Key takeaways from Natalie and Neil

Resources

Details about Karin’s lab and work can be found here https://kjens.engin.umich.edu/ including The Engineering Stress Culture (ESC) Scale, a 10-item measure of undergraduate student perceptions of engineering stress culture and The Undergraduate Engineering Stressors Questionnaire (U-ESQ) (https://kjens.engin.umich.edu/research-well-being/)

Join us! Become a member of the European Society for Engineering

Education, SEFI, Europe's largest network of engineering

educators: www.sefi.be

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.