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

工程实践中存在着开放性和结构不良的问题，工程教育的一个重要方面就是教会学生如何解决这些问题。虽然有努力理解和改进设计教学，较少的工作已经做了“预设计”的问题，即开放式的问题，共享一些设计元素，但不包括所有的设计问题的复杂性。我们认为，有必要了解这些预先设计的问题解决的性质，以最终制定有效的干预措施，提高学生的能力，解决开放式和结构不良的问题。作为表征问题的一种手段，我们提出了一个框架，该框架根据需要做出的决策的数量以及问题是否只有一个正确答案来对问题进行分类（封闭式）或有多个答案，需要判断哪个最合适本项目的总体研究问题是：哪些因素影响了工科本科生解决开放性工程问题的能力？我们将通过一项涉及一所大型公立大学大三和大四材料工程专业学生的研究来解决这个问题。我们的项目包括定量和定性两个部分。定量部分的目标是确定各种因素对学生解决工程问题能力的相对重要性。具体来说，我们假设，学生谁认为所有的知识是肯定的和绝对的将有更多的困难解决模棱两可的（开放式）的问题比学生谁认识到需要证明结论。同样，我们假设，学生的能力有限，同时与多个项目的记忆将有更多的困难解决开放式的问题。定性部分的目标是确定学生用来解决开放式问题的过程。通过观察学生解决问题的过程，并对学生进行访谈，我们将能够识别出成功解决问题者的属性、特征和过程，并探索他们使用的具体策略。这反过来又可以导致改进STEM领域解决问题技能的策略，在STEM领域，开放式，结构不良的问题（例如设计，产品开发，研究等）在该领域的专业实践的特点。我们希望这项研究的结果将告知改进的课堂材料和教科书，教学解决问题的课堂策略的发展，以及专业发展活动，以装备教师，他们需要教解决问题的工具。

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.