Systems Thinking and Literacy in Curriculum Design for Engineering Education

Abstract

Given current educational trends, it is necessary to move beyond fragmented curricular approaches and promote competencies for understanding interrelationships, feedback loops, complex sociotechnical problems, technical communication, and decision-making. These capabilities must be incorporated across the curriculum through learning outcomes, projects, simulations, authentic assessment, and interdisciplinary integration. This exploratory quantitative curriculum document analysis examined 15 official course syllabi from the first educational cycle of a nationally standardized Mechatronics Engineering curriculum implemented across 130 institutions within the Mexican Technological and Polytechnic Universities subsystem. Each syllabus constituted one documentary unit of analysis (n = 15) and was coded using a 13-item ordinal rubric covering six curricular dimensions. The rubric provided initial evidence of content validity (CVI = 0.92) and sample-specific internal reliability (α = 0.888). Systemic Strategies, Interdisciplinarity, and Assessment showed strong positive associations (ρ = 0.822–0.901). Exploratory factor analysis produced a preliminary one-factor solution that accounted for 53.40% of the variance, whereas the exploratory regression showed that Systemic Strategies was the largest conditional correlate of Assessment. Given the sample size, these findings should not be interpreted as confirmation of a stable measurement structure or predictive structural model. The results highlight preliminary patterns within the intended curriculum and identify opportunities to strengthen the documented integration of communicative literacy, complex assessment, and curricular progression. Larger independent document sets and evidence from enacted and attained curricula are needed.