Empirical Study on Emerging Research: The Role of Epistomological Beliefs and Cognitive Processing on Engineering Students' Ability to Solve Ambiguous Problems

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Open-ended and ill-structured problems are inherent in engineering practice, and a significant aspect of engineering education is to teach students how to solve these problems. While there has been effort to understand and improve teaching of design, less work has been done on "pre-design" problems, i.e. open-ended problems that share some elements of design, but do not encompass all the complexities of design problems. We argue that it is necessary to understand the nature of problem-solving for these pre-design problems in order to ultimately develop effective interventions for improving students' abilities to solve open-ended and ill-structured problems. As a means of characterizing problems, we propose a framework that classifies problems in terms of the number of decisions that need to be made and whether the problem has a single correct answer (close-ended) or has multiple answers which require some judgment as to which is the most appropriate (open-ended).The overall research question for this project is: What factors contribute to undergraduate engineering students' ability to solve open-ended engineering problems? We will address this question through a study involving junior and senior materials engineering students at a large public university. Our project consists of both a quantitative and a qualitative component. The goal of the quantitative component is to identify the relative importance of various factors on students' abilities to solve engineering problems. Specifically, we hypothesize that students who view all knowledge as certain and absolute will have more difficulty solving ambiguous (open-ended) problems than students who recognize the need to justify conclusions. Similarly, we hypothesize that students with limited ability to work with multiple items in memory simultaneously will have more difficulty solving open-ended problems. The goal of the qualitative component is to identify the processes students use to solve open-ended problems. This will be accomplished by observing students solving problems, followed by interviews of those students.Through this project, we will be able to identify the attributes, characteristics, and processes of successful problem solvers, and explore specific strategies they use. This, in turn, can lead to improved strategies for developing problem-solving skills in STEM fields where open-ended, ill-structured problems (e.g. design, product development, research, etc.) characterize professional practice in the field. We expect that the results of this study will inform the development of improved classroom materials and textbooks, classroom strategies for teaching problem-solving, and professional development activities to equip faculty with the tools they need to teach problem-solving.