Research Initiation: Investigating the Role of Problem Typology in Helping Engineering Undergrads Effectively Communicate Their Experience

An important challenge in engineering education is to provide students with real-world experiences that help them to better understand what it means to be an engineer in practice. For such experiences to be truly meaningful, students must also be capable of effectively communicating insights from these experiences. In the short-term, the ability to communicate experience and its relevance is important to producing students with the kinds of skills that are desirable to employers. While professional networks and career fairs can facilitate connections to great opportunities, communication of professional competency is vital to success. In the long-term, communicating professional experiences is critical to being an effective lifelong learner, as an ability to reflect on day-to-day professional situations and recognize opportunities for self-improvement and adaptation is a first step in pursuing additional professional training. This award supports fundamental research into developing tools and techniques that aid students in understanding and communicating the value of a variety of professionally relevant experiences, like engineering club projects, internships, co-ops, and capstone design projects. The outcomes of this research are expected to impact the way in which individual courses and curriculum are designed in order to improve the professional formation of engineering students. In this research to "internalize and communicate experience" refers to a student's metacognition of their professional competencies and the level to which they can effectively communicate those competencies. The primary hypothesis is that providing a problem typology and reflection framework as context for student experiences will improve their ability to internalize and communicate the professional relevance of those experiences. The objective of the project is to investigate this hypothesis and to develop initial recommendations for effectively integrating problem typology into engineering curricula. Four research questions will guide the project plan: 1) To what degree does the introduction of a problem typology impact students' ability to meaningfully reflect on their experiences? 2) To what degree does the introduction of professional competencies (i.e. teamwork, problem-solving skills, communication skills, leadership, initiative) impact students' ability to meaningfully reflect on their experiences? 3) What effect, if any, does explication of problem typology as scaffolded reflection in problem-based learning have on students' ability to meaningfully deconstruct their experiences? 4) What effect does introduction of a professional competencies reflection framework have on students? ability to synthesize and meaningfully communicate their experiences (externalization to outside parties)? These research questions are investigated through student reflections and cover letters, as well as evaluation of mock interviews with engineering professionals. Both qualitative (discourse analysis) and quantitative methods (scoring rubric with professional engineers) are used in the analysis. The outcomes of this work are will lead to development of a methodological framework to support investigation of the process that engineering students use to internalize, re-synthesize, and communicate engineering problem/project experiences in terms of professional competencies. The methodological framework will support development of engineering-specific theories with respect to identity and characterization of processes that underlie engineering formation, as well as research into holistic engineering formation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.