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In recent years, there has been increasing interest within the engineering education research community to prepare engineering students to address wicked problems (WPs) such as climate change, resource scarcity and violent conflict. Previous research suggests that engineering students are able to address WPs if they are given adequate support, but there is a lack of research on what kinds of support are needed. This paper aims to reduce this gap by reporting on students' performance in, and approaches to, addressing WPs when different scaffolding strategies were used in different parts of a rubric-based intervention. The intervention aimed to provide undergraduate engineering students with an understanding of the nature of WPs and with a structured way of addressing them. For each part of the intervention, we discuss affordances for learning provided by the different scaffolding strategies. The results suggest that strong cognitive scaffolding can support students' understanding of the nature of WPs and students' performance in written responses to WPs, but possibly also limits deep engagement with WPs and transfer of learning to other contexts.

The concept of perspectives is important in discussions about the multidimensionality of sustainability problems and the need to consider many different aspects when dealing with them. This paper aims to facilitate discussions among both educators and researchers about didactical approaches to developing students' abilities to deal with the multidimensionality of sustainability challenges through the use of multiple perspectives. For this purpose, a theoretical framework was developed that describes perspectives in terms of a set of general characteristics, as well as a number of ways in which students can develop and reflect on perspectives. Development of the framework was supported by a qualitative content analysis of transcripts from interviews with undergraduate engineering students in Sweden.

Purpose – The aim of this study is to contribute to the quality improvement and long-term strategic development of education for sustainable development (ESD) in engineering education curricula. Design/methodology/approach – The content in 70 courses in environment and SD were characterized and quantified using course document text analysis. Additionally, two questionnaires were sent to students and alumni at Chalmers, and interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with representatives from 16 Swedish companies and five organizations. Findings – It was found that industry demands a broader range of competences in SD amongst engineers in general than what is currently provided. In total, 35 per cent of alumni claim they encounter sustainability issues from sometimes to daily in their work. However, only half of them believe they possess enough competences to make decisions from a sustainability perspective. Quantity, coverage and the level of integration in the educational programme all appear to be important for the students' perceived competences on SD and for the importance that they put on achieving SD. Originality/value – Earlier research has reported on how to further develop the idea and design of ESD and on competence needs in general. Few attempts have been made to assess industry's needs of competences in SD. This paper sheds light on how engineering universities educate for SD and benchmarks this to industry's needs in an exploratory case study, using Chalmers as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]