Collaborative Research: Bridging the Gap Between Academia and Industry in Approaches for Solving Ill-Structured Problems

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Engineers play a crucial role in the development of solutions to today's complex problems. Real world engineering problems are inherently ill-structured, complex, defined by both non-engineering and engineering constraints, often contain missing or conflicting information, and do not have one 'correct' solution as typically taught in engineering classrooms. In order to ensure that engineering graduates are competitive and well-prepared with the skills necessary for the complex problems in the workplace, efforts are needed to improve undergraduate education's focus on solving problems. This project will examine the ill-structured problem solving approaches of undergraduate students, faculty, and professionals within civil engineering. The investigation will involve identifying similarities and differences between problem solving approaches used by engineering professionals and engineering students. Participants' approaches to problem solving and their personal characteristics (e.g., years of experience, demographics, learning style, creativity) will also be studied. Translation from research findings to educational practice will result in recommendations on improving the instruction of complex, ill-structured problem solving in undergraduate engineering education. Educational resources will be developed and disseminated widely to benefit both professors and students. More specifically, the goal of this research project is to investigate differences in the problem solving approaches among engineering students, faculty, and professionals using a mixed-methods data collection and data analysis approach. A mixed-methods approach is ideal for such a study as it involves both quantitative and qualitative data sources to offer a broad and deep examination of engineering problem solving. A diverse set of participants will be recruited for this study to solve ill-structured problems using interviews, think-a-louds, and questionnaires. The quantitative and qualitative data will be analyzed to determine similarities and differences in the patterns of problem solving across engineering students, faculty, and professionals. Comprehensive resources will be developed and disseminated for engineering educators. Such resources will include a guidebook for engineering faculty on the teaching and learning of ill-structured problems, as well as instructional modules demonstrating ill-structured problem solving techniques that can be used in engineering courses. This project has the potential to not only inform future research studies in the area of complex problem solving in engineering contexts, but also for research findings to be translated to educational practice and implications to improve problem solving in undergraduate classrooms.