Review on empathy in engineering education: Conceptions, interventions, and challenges

Context: Despite an innate need for empathetic engineering, the dialogue on what constitutes empathy in engineering, its conceptualization, and the curriculum development to ingrain empathy as a transversal skill is still in its infancy. 

Purpose or Goal: This study develops a broad conceptualization of empathy for engineering education and aggregate interventions to develop and measure it in engineering education. It specifically focuses on exploring the conceptions/frameworks/elements of empathy in engineering, curricular interventions for its development, and approaches and instruments used to measure it. 

Methods: This study is a scoping review of Scopus and Web of Science databases for articles on empathy in engineering education published between 2013 and 2023. 

Outcomes: This research illustrates that while the concept of empathy is not new, its inclusion, conceptualization, and measurements for engineering education are emerging. The conceptualization of empathy in engineering has taken various forms, with emerging frameworks highlighting its multi-dimensional nature. Eleven challenges come to light when examining the interventions for developing empathy at the module, course, and program levels. 

Conclusion: Despite all that we know about the need for empathy in the engineering profession, its foray into engineering education is still in its infancy. The proposed scoping review has implications for both research and practice. It provides a synergistic view of literature on empathy development in engineering with critical findings for conceptions of empathy, recommendations for operationalizing the elements of empathy across progressive years of engineering study and disciplines leading to an array of curricular interventions with appropriate approaches for measuring it. Further research opens opportunities to develop instruments for measuring empathy from discipline-dependent and independent perspectives.