Empathy in Engineering Students – Initial Assessment of Student Perceived Ability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Empathy is an important 21st century skill for engineers, but little is known about how students self-identify their empathy skills. Forty second year systems design engineering students completed a survey containing a subset of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index focused on perspective-taking (seven statements) and empathic concern (two statements) with associated scores of 0-low empathy to 4-high empathy. There was little difference in median scores between statements. However, there was considerable variation between individual student responses. For perspective-taking scores, individual scores ranged from 11 to 28 out of 28. For empathic concern scores, individual scores ranged from 0 to 8 out of 8. There was no significant correlation between perspective-taking and empathic concern scores (rs = 0.280, p =0.084). This suggests a wide range in individual ability that may differ between empathy dimensions. Further research is needed using the full Interpersonal Reactivity Index on a wider diversity of engineering students.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".