Empathy Development in Design Students: A Comparative Analysis of First- And Second-Year Cohorts

This paper explores empathy development in engineering education. Empathy, the ability to understand and share others' feelings, is crucial in engineering practice, enabling engineers to consider the impact of their designs and decisions on stakeholders. Prior research highlights empathy's importance in engineering, connecting it to ethical responsibility and user-centred solutions (Hess et al.,2017). However, challenges exist in integrating empathy into engineering education, including the need for effective pedagogical strategies and tensions between traditional engineering culture and empathy development (Kotluk and Tormey,2025). This paper presents a comparative analysis of empathy development between firstyear and second-year engineering design students. The study uses the Empathy in Design Scale (EMPA-D) (Drouet et al., 2024), modified for engineering students' design tasks. The students in second year had significantly lower scores than first year students on two of the dimensions. These findings prompt the need for better understanding of how this construct changes in order to provide insights into empathy development in engineering students and inform educational practices to foster empathy in curricula.