[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/) # Seeing the System, Positioning the Self: Engineering Students' Conceptualizations of Wicked Problems ## Details **Authors** Tiantian Li; Hector E. Rodriguez-Simmonds **Year** 2026 **Publisher** Systems (MDPI), 14(9), 1075 **Kind of work** article **Discipline** Engineering **Secondary disciplines** Cognitive Science **Reading level** technical **Kind of engagement** scholarly [Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.3390/systems14091075) 10.3390/systems14091075 ## In authors' words ### Abstract This qualitative study focuses on how engineering technology students scope and make sense of complex problems. Systems thinking can help engineers address increasing complexity and uncertainty. Social factors including the culture of disengagement and socio/technical dualism hinder students’ holistic problem-solving approaches. In this study, we ask: How do participants conceptualize a wicked problem and the relationships within? Where and why do participants position themselves in relation to the problem? What social factors influence participants’ conceptualization of wicked problems and how? We conducted task-based interviews with sixteen engineering technology students working through a wicked problem. Interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis. We found that students conceptualized the problem using two mental models: an interconnected iceberg model and a more linear tree model. Students positioned themselves differently in relation to stakeholders, ranging from collaborative equals to external decision-makers who engaged stakeholders in transactional ways. These differences were associated with students’ assumed decision-making power, lived experiences, and sociotechnical reasoning. We argue that systems thinking education should create learning experiences with emotional responses that encourage students to question their assumptions. We recommend future research to explore the relationship between sociotechnical systems thinking and cultural, disciplinary, and epistemological traditions to identify inhibitors, coping strategies, and leverage points, encouraging holistic problem-solving approaches. ### What they set out to do (purpose) A peer-reviewed qualitative study. Sixteen engineering technology students at a large U.S. university talked through an ill-defined "wicked problem" scenario in task-based interviews, and their transcripts were analyzed thematically using DSRP as the framework for what systems thinking is. ### What they found (results) Identifies two dominant student mental models — an 'interconnected iceberg' that preserves complexity and a 'linear tree' that reduces it — and links students' self-positioning to assumed decision-making power and lived experience. ## Commentary ### In short Two independent researchers adopt DSRP as their working definition of systems thinking, not as a passing citation. They build a coding table that operationalizes all four patterns (Table 1), citing the 2008 Evaluation and Program Planning papers, the 2015 SRBS paper, Systems Thinking Made Simple, and all four of the 2022 Systems papers. They then run their analysis through it. The interesting part for the evidence base: the R pattern is what separated the two mental models. Students who produced the richer representation were not distinguishing more things, they were relating more of them. And the depth of P tracked with whether a student collapsed the social/technical dualism that engineering culture trains into them. That is DSRP doing analytic work in someone else's study, on someone else's data, and coming out with a result the authors did not have to strain for. They also register a limit: they read DSRP as defining systems thinking in mainly cognitive terms, so they pair it with Hess's cognitive/affective empathy categories to reach the emotional side of systems inquiry. They frame this as making explicit something they take to be implicit in DSRP already — an extension, not a challenge. ### In more detail Participants came from two engineering technology capstone courses in Fall 2024; some had received a systems thinking intervention that taught DSRP, some had not, but this paper is a secondary analysis that pools them and does not compare the groups. The task was an adapted version of Grohs's Abeesee village scenario — a remote town of 50,000 where many residents cannot afford winter heat and 27 people died the previous year. Students drew or described a representation of the village, worked toward a solution, then reflected. Analysis was reflexive thematic analysis, with field notes, video, participant-made drawings, and one-page narrative profiles per participant. The authors note that all participants who assumed high decision-making power identified as men and all who explicitly claimed limited power identified as women, and that dualist reasoning clustered among white men — while stating plainly that with sixteen students they are not making a generalizable claim about gender. Their recommendations to educators center on building lived experiences that produce cognitive dissonance, since students who had been through something that contradicted their assumptions were the ones who integrated the social and technical. ### Response Two independent researchers adopt DSRP as their working definition of systems thinking and build a coding table operationalizing all four patterns, then use it to analyze how sixteen engineering technology students reason through a wicked problem. They identify two dominant student mental models — an interconnected iceberg that preserves complexity and a linear tree that reduces it. **Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P Shows it makes a difference **Added** 2026-09-06 **How to cite this** Tiantian Li; Hector E. Rodriguez-Simmonds (2026). Seeing the System, Positioning the Self: Engineering Students' Conceptualizations of Wicked Problems. Systems (MDPI), 14(9), 1075.