Board 73: Implicit Attitudes in Engineering: Coding, Marketing and Bias

Some of the most difficult to teach and measure student learning outcomes are those associated with societal awareness and impact. Many engineering classes are already oversaturated with technical material leaving the discussion of current events and social changes that impact our everyday lives for general education courses. This tendency is reinforced by cultural aspects of engineering emphasizing technical skills over social awareness. This leaves topics such as workplace diversity and bias out of engineering courses making it more difficult for students to see it as important. While improvements in diversity have been seen in engineering over recent years, and despite evidence of the importance of diversity in engineering design and for the financial success of companies, there are still hidden ways in which humans slow this progress. As a strongly gender biased discipline, these hidden barriers called implicit attitudes will likely require more than a passing comment or suggestion for students to attend some on-campus event, it will involve introspection and sometimes time to adjust one’s world view. This Work-In-Progress details the development of a module in an introductory coding course that couples social psychology with fundamental code based learning outcomes. This is accomplished through the introduction of implicit association tests (IATs), which allow for the measurement of subconscious attitudes. An implicit attitude test measures the time it takes for a person to categorize words and or images. Average response times are shorter when the items being categorized match subconscious attitudes and longer if they do not match. This type of test can also be used for measuring brand awareness, an important marketing quantity. The lesson plan involves assisting students setting up the framework of the implicit association test, allowing students to select brands to measure brand awareness for and then using the Project Implicit platform to encourage students to explore their own implicit biases [3]. The primary goal of this module is to improve awareness of implicit attitudes and their potential effects on engineering teams while simultaneously learning basics of coding.