Desen Sevi Ozkan

Background: Engineering education research (EER) increasingly invokes the “sociotechnical,” yet the term travels across science and technology studies (STS), engineering studies, and EER in uneven ways. As EER faces shifting political and institutional pressures, understanding how concepts migrate across disciplinary boundaries offers insight into how research problems are constructed, legitimized, and made actionable. Purpose: This paper examines how the concept of the “sociotechnical” has traveled from science and technology studies (STS) and engineering studies into engineering education research (EER), and how it has been translated into “doable problems” that help shape EER. Method: We conducted a three‐part, mixed‐methods study: (1) a citation analysis in Scopus to identify highly cited sociotechnical‐focused engineering education works; (2) a genealogical analysis to trace theoretical and epistemic lineages; and (3) a conventional content analysis of citing articles to examine how sociotechnical is used, transformed, and operationalized across the field. Results: Three highly cited works—Cech & Sherick (2015), Leydens & Lucena (2017), and Trevelyan (2019)—construct different orientations toward sociotechnical: critique of engineering culture, justice‐oriented curricular formation, and workplace‐centered sociotechnical competencies. Citing literature translates these framings into doable problems such as inclusion, justice, and workforce preparation. Across contexts, sociotechnical becomes increasingly narrowed into measurable skills or curricular modules. Conclusions: Sociotechnical functions as a boundary object whose flexibility enables cross‐disciplinary translation but also risks flattening critical, historical, and political dimensions. We argue for treating sociotechnical as an open site of negotiation—one that sustains reflexive, critical engagement rather than reducing complexity to assessable competencies.

Discourses of energy and energy transition have become increasingly prevalent in informal and formal learning spaces. Energy transitions differ across regions, contexts, and technologies. The contextual nature of energy is an opportunity for a sociotechnical approach to its study. Energy transition is not one big change effort but instead is made up of countless decision points negotiated by and through geography, technology, culture, as well as the entanglements of the human and the more‐than‐human. This study explores how undergraduate students in engineering and the liberal arts engage with these complexities as they discuss sustainable energy issues. Through a frame of sociotechnical systems, we examine the discourses of a crossdisciplinary group of students to highlight the diverse ways that individuals conceptualize sustainable energy systems and transitions. We pose two guiding questions: (1) What overarching frames orient students' discussion of local and global energy transitions? (2) What types of context‐specific discourses are embodied in each overarching frame? The research took place in a co‐taught undergraduate course on sustainable energies, led by faculty in political science and mechanical engineering. Using semi‐structured interviews conducted after the course with ten students from varied majors and backgrounds, we analyzed how students engaged with energy transition topics. Two key themes emerged from our analysis. First, students recognized complex sociotechnical systems characterized by the engagements of energy, political, and technological systems, and second, many exhibited technical/social dualisms in their framing of energy systems. Within these two sociotechnical frames, students revealed diverse underlying logics or discourses. This study brings to light students' frames of reason related to technology and society and the context‐specific discourses related to local and global energy transition concerns. Our findings offer valuable insights for both undergraduate and K‐12 educators aiming to foster more holistic and aspirational approaches to sociotechnical science and energy education.

Engineering education often emphasizes technical competencies while underemphasizing and devaluing the social, ethical, and political contexts of engineering systems. This gap is particularly pronounced in middle-year courses, where students develop technical fluency but rarely confront the sociotechnical complexity of real-world problems. We propose sociotechnical judgment as a framework to help students see the intimately intertwining nature of technical knowledge and social, ethical, and contextual reasoning, using energy systems—particularly offshore wind—as an illustrative domain. We designed three course-integrated case studies in thermodynamics, circuits, and statics/dynamics to embed sociotechnical judgment in middle-year engineering courses. These cases include pedagogical strategies, such as project-based learning, problem-based learning, and role-play exercises connecting technical analysis with social, environmental, and policy considerations. The design of these case studies is rooted in real-world problems surrounding U.S. offshore wind, engineering science learning outcomes, and ABET student outcomes. In these pedagogies, we have created opportunities for students to analyze technical systems while engaging with social, ecological, and political factors. Offshore wind projects, including turbine siting, transmission system design, and efficiency trade-offs, provide opportunities to operationalize sociotechnical reasoning in authentic, regionally relevant contexts. Sociotechnical judgment provides a practical framework for bridging technical competency and contextual reasoning in engineering education. Integrating sociotechnical cases into core courses will prepare students to navigate complex, real-world systems through engagement with ethical, social, and environmental considerations inherent in engineering practice.

Background: Large language models (LLMs) have arrived, recently popularized by the tool ChatGPT, and engineering education researchers have begun experimenting with LLM tools in their work. Considering LLM’s ability to produce competent-sounding text and process data, the use cases seem numerous. As we incorporate these models into our research methodologies, there are concerns that we must address related to research quality. Purpose: Although the concerns with LLMs are well-documented at this point, there is still little work focused on examining the implications of this emerging technology tied to specific quality frameworks to anchor these concerns and, ultimately, develop tangible guiding questions or processes for mitigating the negative consequences associated with this technology. Scope: We discuss the limitations and opportunities of LLMs within the context of the Qualifying Qualitative Research Quality (Q3) Framework (Walther et al. 2013; Walther & Sochacka 2014). Discussion/Conclusions: We provide steps for engineering education researchers curious about experimenting with LLMs in their work. This paper highlights that the issues presented by tools like ChatGPT are by no means new. Still, new methods of reflexivity to actively employ positionality are likely necessary for the ethical adoption of such tools in the field.