Learning to See the System: An Exploratory Qualitative Study of Systems Mapping Pedagogy and Sociotechnical Thinking in Undergraduate Engineering Students

Abstract

Engineering curricula offer students few structured opportunities to practice reasoning about problems whose social, political, and economic dimensions are as consequential as their technical ones. This paper reports an exploratory qualitative study of an undergraduate engineering elective in which students investigate a wicked problem of their choice using multiple systems mapping tools, with an explicit emphasis on problem exploration over solution convergence. Drawing on semi-structured post-course interviews with 13 purposively sampled students across three cohorts, including a case-based transfer task set in an unfamiliar sociotechnical context, we examine what capacities students describe developing and how specific mapping tools mediate their reasoning. Interviews were analysed through a combined deductive–inductive coding approach organized by the STOP (Systems Thinking for Opportunity) framework, an analytic scaffold that links Richmond’s systems thinking competencies, the KEEN entrepreneurial mindset dimensions, and Ardichvili et al.’s opportunity identification model. Students described a shift from solution-first thinking toward systemic inquiry, characterized mapping tools as scaffolds that externalized assumptions and structured prior knowledge, and displayed reasoning patterns consistent with adaptive transfer in the case task. These capacities did not develop uniformly: students’ accounts foregrounded structural and causal reasoning far more than reasoning about system behaviour over time, opportunity identification rarely progressed into formal opportunity development, and students were candid about where individual tools constrained their analyses. We therefore interpret systems mapping pedagogy as an amplifier of opportunity-relevant cognition rather than a direct producer of entrepreneurial outcomes. Reflecting the purposive, high-performing sample and the interview-based design, findings are offered as exploratory and bounded to this course context. The study contributes a transparent, tool-level account of how mapping practice mediates sociotechnical reasoning, a case-based transfer task with explicit criteria as a model for assessing sociotechnical learning, and design guidance for educators seeking to build sociotechnical capacity in engineering curricula.