About

Cynthia Atman is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her specialization includes engineering education, engineering design learning, students as emerging engineering professionals, and the use of education research to improve student learning. Her work focuses on understanding and enhancing the educational experiences of engineering students, aiming to develop effective teaching strategies and learning environments that support the development of future engineering professionals.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Political Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Programming language
• Software engineering
• World Wide Web
• Human–computer interaction
• Engineering management
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• “...the foundation you didn’t know you needed”: Integrating design process awareness with resilience to facilitate students learning to navigate complex challenges

  2026-05-08

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper presents Design Process Resilience (DPR), a graduate-level course for Human Centered Design & Engineering students. The curriculum focuses on awareness, metacognition, and resilience in design. We share our teachable moment with a mixed-methods approach to understanding students’ responses about the DPR’s 2024 autumn academic term offering. Our first finding is that through DPR, students developed awareness, metacognition, and resilience in a nuanced way. Our second finding is that the pedagogical tools utilized in DPR were effective and rated highly by the students. We reflected on the success of three pedagogical tools using a complexity theory lens. Through this paper, we show how DPR, alongside other attempts in the HCI education community, collectively re-imagined and created a new pedagogical approach for future HCI education.

  PublisherDOI

• Using design timelines for tracking and reflection on design processes: Emerging insights

  2025-08-21 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the Connection Between Positioning Theory and Educator Experiences

  2024-08-04

  articleOpen access

  Stephanie Cutler and Alexandra Coso Strong (2023) bring attention to how engineering education research often focuses on the impact of educators on students but not the social identities of the educators.These identities can and likely do inform their work.Cutler and Coso Strong also point out the variation among those who educate in engineering (tenured/tenure-track faculty, graduate students, and contingent/adjunct faculty), which is not always acknowledged.By not paying attention to such variation, the impact of work done in engineering education research may be limited.In an effort to illuminate these variations, we report on research that explores some details of the educator experience.In this paper we ask: what does it look like to be an educator working to adapt an existing curriculum for a new term

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Comparing Entering Freshman Engineers: Institutional Differences In Student Attitudes

  2024-01-31 · 29 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  EC 2000 will cause engineering educators to learn more about their students.This includes having a more informed understanding of students' underlying attitudes as they begin their engineering studies and tracking how these attitudes affect learning.Previous research indicates that students enter their first year with a range of perceptions and attitudes about engineering.However, little is known as to how student attitudes vary across institutions.Are initial attitudes correlated with the type of school the individual attends?Do students who attend a private (versus public), or large (versus small) engineering school enter with different perceptions of engineering and their abilities to succeed in engineering?Do students' choice of environment (urban versus rural) and the subsequent culture it provides or whether the institution has a "research" (versus "teaching") focus contribute to their initial attitudes about engineering and about themselves?Such knowledge is important since attitudinal differences among institutions may help to explain differences in academic performance, interest in the engineering pedagogy, and attrition out of or persistence in the program.We have investigated such differences among the freshman classes of 17 US engineering schools.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Journal Entry, July 2020: Affirmation, Inclusion, Equity and Everyone

  International Journal of Engineering Social Justice and Peace · 2021-10-19 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  When we reflect on 2020, especially in the United States, the divides in society amplified by the pandemic and laid bare for all to see following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota in May, 2020 will most likely be the top of mind. We could all see this nation’s history and current complicity for racism, both the systematic and systemic. The moment was not unfamiliar, but markedly different. Initially, we wrote this piece in the summer of 2020, in response to our professional organization’s delay and hesitancy to affirm Black lives, Black students, Black engineers and Black faculty. Many of us were crying out. Allies with commitment to action showed up for and with us -- no questions asked, to ensure that what we felt was at least heard. In nearly a year since our original effort to write this piece together, some things have changed for the better. We saw our professional organization affirm Black lives. We saw some of our colleagues take action, change course and use their influence to make the community better. Some learned, listened and tried to do something new. Others, either remained silent, hopefully in contemplation, but some with a silence that convinces us that they are simply not on the same side. We composed the below entries in the summer of 2020, amid national turbulence and internal reflection. Below we provide four personal stories and some specific calls to action situated in the summer of 2020, but these remain our aspirations and hopes for the field of engineering education.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Focus Groups To Identify Industrial Engineering Students Perceptions Of Selected Abet Outcomes

  2020-09-03

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  As we began to review and revise the objectives for our Industrial Engineering program at the University of Washington, we decided to include students in the process. It is the students who are expected to meet program objectives before graduation, yet they may not understand the rationale behind the objectives or may not interpret them in the same way as faculty and others responsible for their implementation. In November 2000, we asked five students from the Department of Industrial Engineering for their interpretations of five performance-based outcomes for graduates of the program. We wanted to document in their own words-not ourswhat the students thought the outcomes meant and how to assess them. Four of the outcomes were selected from a list of eleven outcomes developed by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) for all engineering disciplines. The fifth outcome was developed by the department and was specific to industrial engineering. Four students met together in a series of three focus group discussions. The fifth student was interviewed alone on three separate occasions because of scheduling conflicts. Students provided insightful perceptions, while also sharing their views of the industrial engineering discipline in general and of themselves as future industrial engineers. Some student perceptions were particularly revealing. For example, students focused on corporate and engineering issues when they were asked to describe a broad education. In general, students consider competence in the five outcomes as critical for practicing industrial engineers. They feel that they are developing such competence through the industrial engineering curriculum at the university, supplemented by technical electives and participation in voluntary activities outside of the classroom. In addition, they feel that graduates must possess the ability to describe to prospective employers the range of services that an industrial engineer can provide.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exploring If and How Knowledge of a Humanitarian Disaster Affects Student Design Thinking

  2020-09-11 · 2 citations

  article

  Abstract Exploring the Influence of Humanitarian Context on Engineering Students’ Design ConsiderationsAbstractCurrent national priorities in engineering education in the U.S., such as those advanced by ABETaccreditation criteria and the NAE’s Engineer of 2020 reports, emphasize the importance oftraining engineers to situate their work more broadly. Due to factors such as globalization,climate change, and even issues of social justice, engineers must learn to include and addressconsiderations beyond the traditional engineering purview of the technical and economic. Ethicsand the social/societal impacts of engineering, for example, rarely find much space in acurriculum packed with technical “bread and butter” topics. One possible way to expandcoverage of these important broader considerations, and thus to provide opportunities for broaderthinking, is to design course materials using different background contexts. In this paper weexplore the question: How does a humanitarian design context, as opposed to the moretraditional contexts provided by industrial, commercial, or military applications of engineering,influence engineering students’ design considerations?This paper presents a qualitative study being performed on a subset of longitudinal cohort datafrom the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education’s (CAEE) Academic PathwaysStudy (APS). Interviews of third-year engineering students were conducted at four institutions inthe U.S. during the spring of 2006. These interviews took place immediately following a shortdesign-scoping task (the analysis of which is reported elsewhere) that read “Over the summer theMidwest experienced massive flooding of the Mississippi River. What factors would you takeinto account in designing a retaining wall system for the Mississippi?” Semi-structured post-taskinterviews then asked the students to reflect on their design task responses, and includedquestions about their knowledge of Hurricane Katrina and the influence it might have had ontheir responses. Specifically, the interview question that provides the data analyzed in this paperasked: “Did what you know about Hurricane Katrina affect how you approached the Mississippiflooding activity today? If so, please describe.” Given the qualitative nature of the data and theexploratory nature of our research question, analysis follows a descriptive phenomenographicapproach in order to capture the breadth and diversity of responses.Preliminary thematic analysis of all transcripts from one institution shows that while manystudents (9 of the 24 who were asked at this school) indicated their knowledge of HurricaneKatrina did not influence their design task responses (see Table 1), others reported a variety ofways that it affected their thinking to varying degrees (see Table 2), including that it helpedthem to remember and consider the societal impacts of engineering design and the importance ofprotecting human life. Our findings to date suggest several things, including 1) that manyengineering students at the analyzed institution did not have much knowledge of Katrina and/ordid not recognize its similarities with the design task (both of which are supported by theinterview data), and 2) that non-traditional engineering contexts, such as humanitarianapplications of engineering, may have pedagogical value for the teaching and learning of broadthinking skills such as those required to address issues of ethics and social justice.Table 1: Responses to Question of If Knowledge Table 2: Indications of How Knowledge of Katrina Affected Design Tasks of Katrina Affected Design Tasks Code** Description Number of Description (student response indicating:) Responses†† Number of Code* (student response Environment environmental concerns or impacts 4 Responses indicating:) Protect Life protection of human life 4 Katrina did NOT affect People consideration of people (non-mortality related) 3 No performance of the design 9 Cost cost issues or economics 3 task Wall Strength wall strength as a technical design consideration 3 Katrina definitely affected notions of making it real (legitimizing or Made It Real 3 (2) Yes performance of the design 6 providing a way to visualize) task Societal Impacts societal impacts 3 (2) climate or weather as a technical design Climate/Weather 2 Katrina had a little bit of consideration A Little effect (i.e., with a positive or 5 Wall Aesthetics wall aesthetics as a technical design consideration 2 surprised connotation) Force of Hurricane force of hurricane as a tech. design consideration 1 Katrina did not have much Need Accurate Info the need for accurate design info / specifications 1 Not Much effect (i.e., with a negative 5 Politics political considerations or impacts 1 or depreciating connotation) Population Density population density as a tech. design consideration 1 Root Causes the importance of addressing root causes 1 TOTAL 25† Unintended unintended consequences 1* The codes in this table are mutually exclusive (i.e., each Consequences interviewee is assigned one and only one code). Urgency project timeline and urgency 1† The total number of responses exceeds the number of Wall Height wall height as a technical design consideration 1 interviewees who were asked the protocol question because one student who was not asked the question spontaneously Wall Length wall length as a technical design consideration 1 mentioned Katrina as affecting her design task response. Wall Lifetime wall lifetime as a technical design consideration 1 Wall Quality wall quality as a technical design consideration 1 Water Height water height as a technical design consideration 1 Worst-case considering worst-case scenarios 1 TOTAL CODES: TOTAL 40 (13) 22 ** The codes in this table are NOT mutually exclusive (i.e., many interviewees expressed more than one way Karina affected their design task response). †† The number of responses equals the number of different interviewees except where a second number is given in parentheses, indicating the actual number of interviewees.

  PublisherDOI

• Preparing Engineering Graduate Students To Teach: An Innovative Course Design And Evaluation

  2020-09-03 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 2655 Preparing Engineering Graduate Students to Teach: An Innovative Course Design and Evaluation Cathie Scott,* Molly Johnson,** Cynthia J. Atman* *University of Washington/**Agilent Technologies Introduction In spring 2000 we designed and delivered a three-credit course to prepare students for careers in teaching. The course was offered through the industrial engineering department and was open to all engineering graduate students. Fourteen students enrolled—seven men and seven women— representing the industrial, civil and environmental, electrical, bioengineering, and materials sciences engineering disciplines. The course met for 100 minutes twice a week for 10 weeks. The course content was defined by the instructors, but the instruction was (to a high degree) tailored to the understanding of the students because it was the students themselves who designed the instruction. The course focus was on reflective practice and on findings from cognitive science and education research and their application to engineering teaching and learning. Throughout the quarter, we tried to maintain a tension between theory and practice. On the theory side, students became familiar with conceptual change, memory, motivation, and other learning concepts. On the practice side, students were exposed to innovative teaching methods through the example of their instructors, through their readings, through exercises such as creation of concept maps and conceptual probes, through reflective essays and e-mails, and through two teaching assignments. In this paper, we provide background on our rationale for course design and describe the course structure. We then show one student’s responses to a few of the assignments and activities used both to promote learning about the course concepts and to elicit student thinking about teaching and learning at different points in the course. Finally, we describe our course evaluation methods, summarize student responses to these evaluations, and provide our own reflections on the course. Our Course Design Rationale Ph.D. graduates who obtain faculty positions are well qualified in their discipline knowledge, but few enter their academic careers with any formal training in teaching. The dominant source of the conceptions of these new instructors about the teaching endeavor is based on their experiences as a student, and possibly as a teaching assistant. These experiences are dominated by lecture format courses where the student classroom involvement is primarily passive. Such Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2001, American Society for Engineering Education

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Designing for Communities: The Impact of Domain Expertise

  2020-09-04

  article

  Abstract Designing for Communities: The Impact of Domain ExpertiseEngineers are often tasked with designing projects that demand consideration of local, regional,and even global communities. The contexts in which engineering projects are situated can becomplex, and require both technical expertise and an ability to consider broad contextual issues.While expert engineers hold a myriad of experiential knowledge in their domain of expertise toaid them in thinking more broadly; the beginning engineer relies predominately upon theireducational background. ABET, the engineering accreditation body, specifically states inCriterion 3H, that engineering programs should help engineering students achieve the “the broadeducation necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic,environmental, and societal context.” Teaching these skills to engineering students is a difficulttask, but one that is essential if engineers are to design for the benefit of the communities inwhich they work, interact, and reside. The research presented in this paper addresses thischallenge by seeking to understand the relationships between the possession of expertise in aparticular domain and the potential accompanying ability to situate problems and think morebroadly. Insights from this work can inform the creation of methods to support engineeringstudents in developing expertise that involves the broad thinking necessary to encouragecommunity-oriented design solutions. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of transcribed think-aloud sessions whereinparticipants were given the task of designing a playground within a three hour time frame. Thesample consisted of five engineering experts screened for lack of playground design knowledgeand four playground experts. All participants were chosen to represent a spectrum of ability increating quality design artifacts. Following coding of transcriptions, derived data wereinstantiated as visualizations to uncover initial relationships between codes and the participantsthemselves. The results of this analysis demonstrate that participants with domain expertise (i.e.playground experts), when compared with non-domain experts (i.e. engineering experts), wereinclined to consider context (esp. socially oriented factors) more often, regarded actors and theiruse of the playground equipment in a holistic manner, and utilized professional domainknowledge over personal knowledge almost exclusively. Bucharelli (2008) stated, “The way we structure our curriculum and teach our subjects allconspire to instill in the student the idea that engineering work is value-free”. Suchstraightforward, linear thinking in design processes may be detrimental to broad thinking andlimit engineers’ ability to be successful designers of community-based projects. Byacknowledging the impact of domain expertise and experience, we may find inspiration and alens through which engineering educators may begin to better aid their students in developingdesign expertise that is connected, socially-conscious, and inspired.

  PublisherDOI

• Integrating Reflection into Engineering Education

  2020 · 130 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering ethics

  Abstract Integrating Reflection into Engineering EducationWe live in a world of high expectations. For example, we are expected to deeplyunderstand who we are, what we believe, and how we interact with others. In aconstant state of busyness and multitasking, we "should" work toward such deepunderstanding by reflecting—the act of looking back on experiences to understandwhat they mean in service of the future. In engineering, with the increasingemphasis on large-scale grand challenges, people-oriented issues, rapidly changingwork contexts, and lifelong learning, reflection has become even more important.While reflection is often characterized as individual and self-directed, there areopportunities (a) to conceptualize it as both an individual and a social endeavor and(b) to more intentionally support it through a variety of instructional strategies.In our work, we are interested in creating more reflection opportunities forengineering undergraduates. In our proposed paper, we plan to explore reflection inengineering education by (1) proposing a particular way of talking about reflection,(2) benchmarking reflection in other disciplines, and (3) framing movement towardmore effectively supporting student reflection. In Boyer's terms, this set ofactivities represents a scholarship of integration.We will start with a proposed way of talking about reflection in order to groundconversations. Given the everyday nature of the term, it can be hard to seereflection as a disciplined, critical form of thinking. Building on that, it is quitepossible that the term is used in different ways. Some of the scholars who writeabout reflection point to this issue--that people using the term often are focusing onrelated, but slightly different phenomena. In framing our proposed way of talkingabout reflection, we will draw conceptualizations of reflection from a variety ofscholarly communities.In drawing across disciplines (such as teacher education, medicine, management,and higher education), we will offer different perspectives about how othercommunities talk about and support reflection. Benchmarking reflection in otherdisciplines can inform the engineering education community as we work towardintegrating activities that support student reflection into our practice.Finally, we will present a framework for understanding opportunities andchallenges associated with supporting reflective thinking in engineering education.The framework emphasizes thinking from a student perspective (whether studentsare or are not engaging in reflective thinking), as well as an educator perspective(whether educators are or are not intentionally trying to support reflectivethinking). This framework leads to the identification of four conditions: (1)naturally occurring reflective thinking, (2) missed opportunities for reflectivethinking, (3) successfully supported reflective thinking, and (4) unsuccessfulefforts to support reflective thinking. This framework is helpful for benchmarkingthe situation in engineering education, as we will illustrate through variousexamples. In addition, the framework provides a backdrop for talking about someof the challenges associated with supporting reflection in engineering education.We anticipate that this work will permit (a) researchers interested in reflection tobetter conceptualize their research interests and (b) educators interested inreflection to better design activities to support this important form of thinking.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Assessing students' consideration of context in engineering design

  NSF · $287k · 2010–2013

• Engineering Education Pioneers and Trajectories of Impact

  NSF · $448k · 2013–2017

• COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Preparing for the Grand Challenges: When and how do engineering students learn broad thinking?

  NSF · $261k · 2010–2014

• Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education

  NSF · $12.4M · 2003–2010

• SGER: Engineering in Context: An investigation of how experts and students incorporate global and societal issues in their engineering design processes

  NSF · $200k · 2006–2009

Frequent coauthors

• Sheri Sheppard

  Stanford University

  84 shared

• Lorraine Fleming

  72 shared

• Ruth Streveler

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  53 shared

• Reed Stevens

  51 shared

• Jennifer Turns

  University of Southern California

  47 shared

• Robin Adams

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  37 shared

• Ken Yasuhara

  University of Washington

  34 shared

• Karl Smith

  University of Minnesota

  31 shared

Labs

• Human Centered Design & EngineeringPI

Awards & honors

• Design Studies Best Paper 2018 award
• Design Studies Best Paper 2013 award
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sc…
• Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education (AS…