Background: To prepare engineers who can address complex sociotechnical problems, a deep understanding of engineers' complex problem-solving approaches is needed. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study operationalizes comprehensive systems thinking as an analysis framework that attends to aspects of engineering work and relationships among those aspects.…

Background: Pre-college engineering education reform documents aim to help students develop engineering literacy. Helping students develop sophisticated epistemological views about engineering makes a significant contribution toward developing engineering-literate citizenry. Despite these widely recognized benefits, research on students' and…

Background: Engineering students commonly learn domain knowledge by engaging with visual representations of it. However, at times they have trouble accessing information from these representations due to the way information is encoded in features of the representation. Purpose: To describe how students engage with representation features, we…

Background: Engineering students inconsistently apply equilibrium when solving problems in statics, but few studies have explored why. Visual cognition studies suggest that features of the visual representations we use to teach students influence what domain knowledge they use to solve problems. However, few studies have explored how visual…

Background: Conceptual change is a process in which an individual's understanding and the basis of this understanding change over time. Vosniadou's framework theory explains conceptual change in terms of how students learn to relate the observable and unobservable in everyday phenomena. As a result, courses that relate physical phenomena to…

Background: Little research exists on students' misconceptions about semiconductors, why they form, and what role educational resources like simulations play in misconception formation. Research on misconceptions can help enhance student learning about semiconductors. Purpose (Hypothesis): This project sought to identify students' misconceptions…

Background: Students' beliefs about knowledge (epistemic beliefs) and their motivations toward processing information (epistemic motivation) have been suggested as influencing aspects of learning. Purpose: This study investigated the relationship between engineering students' approach to solving an open-ended homework problem and their epistemic…

Background: Conceptual understanding is a prerequisite for engineering competence. Concept maps may be effective tools for assessing conceptual knowledge, yet further work is needed to examine scoring methods. Purpose: Our purpose was to evaluate the efficacy of three concept map scoring methods. Traditional scoring requires judges to count…

Background: The personal epistemologies of engineering faculty are an important and as yet underinvestigated aspect of engineering education. In this study, personal epistemology is defined as the stances an individual takes on issues related to knowledge and knowing, such as what it means to know, what counts as knowledge, and what makes some…

Background: Incorporating environmental sustainability (ES) into engineering education is vital to both individual engineering students' success and to the profession as a whole. This study explores attitudes, conceptions, and misconceptions about ES that students bring to the classroom. A promising framework of design-based research is applied to…

Background: Engineering programs strive to retain students and prepare them for engineering careers. Introducing group design projects into courses may help keep students interested while also improving their learning outcomes. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study measures differences in student content knowledge and intention to persist in engineering…