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

新兴研究的实证研究：认识论信念和认知加工对工科学生解决模糊问题能力的作用

• 批准号: 0909976
• 负责人: Elliot Douglas
• 金额: $ 80.52万
• 依托单位: University of Florida
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-08-15 至 2014-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0909976&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Empirical; Study; Emerging; Research; Role

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.

开放性和结构性不良的问题是工程实践中固有的，工程教育的重要方面是教学学生如何解决这些问题。尽管已经努力理解和改善设计的教学，但在“设计前”问题上做的工作较少，即具有共享一些设计要素的开放式问题，但并未涵盖设计问题的所有复杂性。我们认为，有必要了解这些前设计问题解决问题的性质，以最终开发有效的干预措施，以提高学生解决开放性和结构性不良问题的能力。作为表征问题的一种手段，我们提出了一个框架，该框架可以根据需要做出的决策数量以及问题是否有一个正确的答案（近距离）或有多个答案来对问题进行分类，或者对哪些最合适的（开放性的）进行一些判断。该项目的整体研究问题是：哪些因素是什么因素有助于解决工程学学生的开放式启动启动的启用问题问题？我们将通过一项涉及大型公立大学的初级和高级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组成部分。定量组件的目的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，我们假设认为所有知识是确定和绝对的学生将在解决模棱两可的（开放式）问题方面更加困难，而那些认识到有必要证明结论是合理的学生。同样，我们假设，同时在记忆中使用多个项目的能力有限的学生在解决开放式问题方面有更多困难。定性组成部分的目的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实现。通过该项目，我们将能够确定成功解决问题的问题的属性，特征和过程，并探索他们使用的特定策略。反过来，这可能会导致改进的策略，以在STEM领域发展解决问题的技能，在该领域中，结构不良的问题（例如设计，产品开发，研究等）表征了该领域的专业实践。我们预计这项研究的结果将为改进的课堂材料和教科书，教学解决问题的课堂策略以及专业发展活动的发展提供信息，以使教职员工配备他们教授解决问题所需的工具。