Investigation of Context Across Engineering Domains: Bridging the Eye-Mind Divide

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This research will identify the types of contexts, including pictures, sketches and diagrams, which are utilized in contemporary transportation and water resources engineering practice and in undergraduate engineering curricula. The project will investigate the influence of the identified engineering problem contexts on students' and practicing engineers' performance in solving these problems and what they pay attention to during the solution process. While the problems are being solved, participants will be wearing a mobile eye-tracker and responding to questions about what they are doing. These two sets of data will be analyzed to determine how important different elements of the engineering problems are to arriving at solutions. With this knowledge engineering educators and researchers will be able to develop better materials that maximize the learning of engineering students, better preparing them to understand what kinds of contexts are used in authentic engineering practice. Developing situated or authentic engineering knowledge and ways of thinking in engineering students has been identified as a priority by the National Research Council, with the theoretically founded expectation that it will result in students who are more capable of innovative engineering design. Progress in this direction requires fundamental research on how contexts authentic to engineering practice influence cognition and learning in novices and experts, coupled with the design of research-based curriculum. The specific goals of this research are to synthesize novice and expert engineers' mental representations of transportation and hydraulics engineering concepts using an innovative research methodology combining (1) identification of engineering and academic contexts with practicing engineers and engineering faculty, (2) real time think-aloud interviews, (3) eye-tracking, and (4) reflective clinical interviews. This knowledge will further our understanding of critical elements of engineering problems and be used to develop new practices for the conduct of engineering education research and the thoughtful inclusion of context in newly developed engineering curricula.