BOARD # 427: Preliminary Results of Understanding and Scaffolding the Productive Beginnings of Engineering Judgment in Undergraduate Students (RFE)

This paper presents the continuation of progress designing, implementing, and assessing the usefulness of open-ended modeling problems (OEMPs) with a focus on scaffolding OEMPs to support students’ conceptual understanding of course content and improving the emerging Engineering Modeling Judgment (EMJ) taxonomy. OEMPs are aimed to support the beginnings of engineering judgment in undergraduate engineering students as they apply their intuition, real world experiences, and conceptual knowledge to solve “ill-defined” problems that do not have a single correct answer. Studying how instructors notice student thinking and how students exercise their developing judgments is important as it can help train future instructors to better notice and recognize their own students' thought processes. By scaffolding an OEMP, instructors can provide students with enough assistance to make the problem solvable while allowing students to engage and grapple with the problem in a way that exercises their engineering judgment and improves learning.