Background: Undergraduate students consistently struggle with mastering concepts related to thermodynamics. Prior work has shown that haptic technology and intensive hands-on workshops help improve learning outcomes relative to traditional lecture-based thermodynamics instruction. The current study takes a more feasible approach to improving…

Background: Civil engineers design systems that have the potential to impact existing oppressive societal conditions. Critical action--the ability to recognize and act against oppressive conditions--is an obligation for civil engineers committed to building a more just world. Purpose/Hypothesis: History reveals that civil engineers often do not…

Simplifying equations via assumptions is integral to the "engineering method." Algebraic scaling helps in teaching the engineering skill of making good assumptions. Algebraic scaling is more than a pedagogical tool. It can create a solution where one was not possible before scaling. Scaling helps in engineering proper design…

Mathematics plays a crucial role in engineering education. Students who are good at math are often advised to consider engineering as a career. In this study, engineers, mathematics teachers, and engineering professors were asked about the type of mathematics representative of engineering, whether the engineering problems created by math…

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…

Contribution: Two general rules for calculating, in the time domain, step discontinuities of voltages and currents in electric circuits, combining physical principles and basic mathematical treatment. The two general rules, resulting from a formal method of analysis, provide a straightforward way to update the states of a circuit, immediately…

Background: Both learning and problem solving are major goals of complex problem solving in engineering education. The order of knowledge construction and problem solving in learning through problem solving, however, has not been explained in current literature. Objectives: To understand their relationships, this study compared the effects of…

Heuristics are approaches engineers use for solving problems and making decisions with quick, often approximate, calculations and/or judgement calls. Such approaches have become marginalized in structural engineering education to make room for more theoretical and precise approaches. As a result, engineering students are less confident with…

Engineering technology students often forgo a methodical approach of solving or answering questions on assignments or exams in favor of an intuition-based approach, emphasizing educated guessing (Broberg et al., 2008). Faculty observations have noted these student solutions often provide explanations, usually sans calculations, to support answers…

How is it possible to create and continuously improve a quality learning environment for our students? We present our one-year course on engineering thermodynamics as a case study in which we investigate the learning environment based on a competency model from the students' perspective. Based on the analysis of our course structure and exam…

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…

Engineering curriculum often fails to connect content and decisions to impacts on diverse, particularly marginalized, communities. Given that integration of social justice ideas into curriculum is currently uncommon among most faculty, we provide resources in the form of a workshop to help catalyze these efforts by teaching faculty how to…

Contribution: This article provides an examination of changes in first-year engineering students' perceptions of the role of an engineer after completing the Engineers Without Borders Challenge. Background: Essential pre- and post-comparisons missing in existing studies on the Challenge are provided, as well as comparison to other first-year…

Problem solving is a common activity for engineering students and practicing engineers as they learn and practice the use of engineering concepts. Understanding the approach to a problem provides a glimpse at unique problem-solving behaviors that can be used as a means to compare different problem solvers. Engineering education research has…

We have developed an assessment of authentic problem-solving in chemical engineering, which we used to measure students' problem-solving at the beginning and end of a cornerstone design course. We measured how much problem-solving students learned, and how these students compared with data collected from seniors at the beginning of the capstone…