Everyday Problem Solving in Engineering: Lessons for Engineering Educators
This study was undertaken as part of the activities of the NSF-funded Center for the Study of Problem Solving. Although we did not accomplish our primary goal of funding a major center, we did complete research activities that contributed to that effort.
Our goal was to articulate how STEM workers solved everyday workplace problems and to conduct research on methods that would better prepare STEM students to assume those workplace roles. That meant better understanding the nature of the problem that STEM workers, including engineers, regularly solved. We assumed that engineers are hired, retained, and rewarded for solving problems. Further, we assumed that most engineering problems were ill-structured problems. What we hoped to find was what makes them ill-structured, so that we could design more effective instructional strategies for STEM education.
Most STEM education now is based on knowledge domains, rather than the kinds of problems that engineers solve. This study was an effort to better understand the nature of workplace problem solving. For the study, we interviewed over 100 engineers, asking them to describe a problem they had solved in their careers. We indexed those interviews in order to build a case library of engineering stories. Based on the theory of case-based reasoning, these indexes are a priori descriptions of the nature of workplace problems. Our goal was the support our proposal with some empirical data.
Unsatisfied with the sensitivity of that analysis, we performed qualitative coding of those interviews. We next performed axial coding to combine categories that may overlap. What we found was that workplace problems are ill structured and complex because they possess uncertain and often conflicting goals, and that success standards were usually not based on engineering standards. Nor were the problems constrained by engineering standards, but rather affected by budgetary and temporal issues. Virtually all engineering problems have multiple solution methods, the selection of which was based more on experience than engineering standards. Nearly every engineering problem is made more complex because of unanticipated problems that emerge during the solution. Solving engineering problems is nearly always distributed among a team of individuals who must communicate with each other and work collaboratively in order to achieve a successful solution. We also discovered that engineers use multiple forms of knowledge representation, which has significant implications for education.
We explored a number of implications for engineering education. We argued that a primary goal of engineering education programs should be the ability to transfer lessons from the classroom to the workplace. A method for accomplishing that is problem-based learning, which is being experimented with in a number of engineering education programs. Very few of those programs use problems systemically throughout the curriculum. Rather they require authentic problem solving only in capstone courses. Many of those programs do not engage students in learning how to solve complex, authentic engineering problems. Although most engineers are paid to solve variants of design problems, it is important to require learners to solve a variety of problems that require them to manage multiple sub-problems; reconcile multiple, conflicting constraints and criteria; evaluate solutions to various problems and to justify their selections; solutions; communicate and collaborate with a variety of professional and paraprofessional team members on all aspects of the problem-solving process; anticipate and reconcile intervening problems and perturbations to the problem-solving process; use multiple formalisms to represent problems; and adapt to changing project conditions and unanticipated problems.
Author 1: David Jonassen [email protected]
Author 2: Johannes Strobel [email protected]
Article Link: http://www.asee.org