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

开放性和非结构化问题是工程实践中固有的问题，而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。虽然人们一直在努力理解和改进设计教学，但在“预设计”问题上做的工作却很少，即共享一些设计元素的开放式问题，但不包括设计问题的所有复杂性。我们认为，有必要了解这些预先设计问题的解决问题的本质，以便最终制定有效的干预措施，提高学生解决开放式和结构不良问题的能力。作为表征问题的一种手段，我们提出了一个框架，根据需要做出的决定的数量以及问题是否有一个正确答案（封闭式）或有多个答案（需要判断哪个是最合适的（开放式））来对问题进行分类。本项目的总体研究问题是：哪些因素影响工科本科生解决开放式工程问题的能力？我们将通过一项涉及一所大型公立大学材料工程专业大三和大四学生的研究来解决这个问题。我们的项目由定量和定性两个部分组成。定量部分的目标是确定各种因素对学生解决工程问题的能力的相对重要性。具体来说，我们假设那些认为所有知识都是确定和绝对的学生在解决模棱两可（开放式）问题时比那些认识到需要证明结论的学生更困难。同样，我们假设同时处理多个记忆项目的能力有限的学生在解决开放式问题时会遇到更多困难。定性部分的目标是确定学生用来解决开放式问题的过程。这将通过观察学生解决问题，然后对这些学生进行访谈来完成。通过这个项目，我们将能够识别成功的问题解决者的属性、特征和过程，并探索他们使用的具体策略。反过来，这可以导致在STEM领域发展解决问题技能的改进策略，在这些领域，开放式，结构不良的问题（例如设计，产品开发，研究等）是该领域专业实践的特征。我们期望这项研究的结果将为改进课堂材料和教科书、教学问题解决的课堂策略以及专业发展活动的发展提供信息，以使教师具备教授问题解决所需的工具。

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.