Background: A defining characteristic of expertise is the use of intuition to navigate tasks. The construct of intuition and its importance is well-studied in other disciplines, but little is known about how it translates to engineering. Existing literature on intuition does not clearly define the construct and its relationship to problem solving,…

Solving ill-structured problems is a complex task that is required of engineers who work in industry. To better prepare undergraduate engineering students for this complex task and their future professional careers, this paper provides an analysis of the results of research focusing on the study of problem-solving processes adopted by civil…

Epistemic beliefs, epistemic cognitions, and self-regulation processes have a significant role in students' learning. Through this study, I investigated the role of mechanical engineering students' epistemic beliefs and epistemic cognitions involved in self-regulation processes while working on tasks with different difficulty levels. In this…

One goal of undergraduate engineering education is to prepare students with the knowledge, skills, and decision-making strategies that are necessary for success in engineering practice. One proposed method to teach students these skills is to incorporate habits of mind into K-12 and undergraduate curricula. Habits of mind are the intelligent,…

Engineering design thinking is "a complex cognitive process" including divergence-convergence, a systems perspective, ambiguity, and collaboration (Dym, Agogino, Eris, Frey, & Leifer, 2005, p. 104). Design is often complex, involving multiple levels of interacting components within a system that may be nested within or connected to other systems.…

The authors investigated the differences in using problem decomposition and problem recomposition between dyads of engineering experts, engineering seniors, and engineering freshmen. Participants worked in dyads to complete an engineering design challenge within 1 hour. The entire design process was video and audio recorded. After the design…

The research was conducted to compare the impacts of problem-based learning (PBL) and example-based learning (EBL) on the learning performance in an engineering domain. The research was implemented by means of experimental design. Specifically, a two-group experiment with a pre- and post-test design was used in this research. A total of 37…

Decision making in most universities is taught within the conventional OR/MS (Operations Research/Management Science) paradigm. This paradigm is known to be "hard" since it is consisted of mathematical tools, and normally suitable for solving structured problems. In complex situations the conventional OR/MS paradigm proves to be…

One of the major concerns of the Engineering Accreditation Council (EAC) is the need for an effective monitoring and evaluation of program outcome domains that can be associated with courses taught under the Mechanical Engineering program. However, an effective monitoring method that can determine the results of each program outcome using Bloom's…

Peer review is a reciprocal process whereby students produce feedback reviews on the work of peers and receive feedback reviews from peers on their own work. Prior research has primarily examined the learning benefits that result from the receipt of feedback reviews, with few studies specifically exploring the merits of producing feedback reviews…

Polytechnics in Bangladesh endeavour to produce quality graduates for national and international job markets. The quality of graduates depends on several factors. This study examines the implementation process of the polytechnic curriculum with the objectives of determining the current level of practices in learning/teaching material design, in…

A study was conducted at the Technical University Berlin involving students who twice failed the written examination in the first semester course Linear Algebra for Engineers in order to better understand the reasons behind their failure. The study considered student understanding in terms of Bloom's taxonomy and the ways in which students…

This exploratory study highlights certain differences in the way an expert and a novice engineer used their analyzing and generating skills while solving a fairly ill-structured design problem. The expert tends to use more inferences and elaboration when solving the design problem and the novice tend to use analysis that is focused on the…

As much research has demonstrated, novel scientific concepts do not arise fully formed in the head of a scientist but are created in problem-solving processes, which can extend for considerable periods and even span generations of scientists. To understand concept formation and conceptual change it is important to investigate these processes in…

The course for the final year project for engineering students, because of its strongly research-based, open-ended format, tends to not have well defined learning outcomes, which are also not aligned with any accepted pedagogical philosophy or learning technology. To address this problem, the revised Bloom's taxonomy table of Anderson and…