Engineering undergrads effectively communicate their experience

Programs across the country encourage and facilitate experiential learning through a variety of mechanisms that help students transition from theory to practice. For such experiences to be truly meaningful to professional formation, students must also be capable of internalizing and effectively communicating insights from these experiences later. We conjecture that providing an engineering problem typology and reflection framework as context for student experiences will improve students' ability to internalize and communicate the professional relevance of those experiences. In this NSF PFE:RIEF sponsored research project we are using mixed-methods to collect pre / post data on students' engineering epistemological beliefs, written reflections that consider the professional aspects of engineering projects, mock interviews, and group problem-solving discussions. Between the pre / post data collection, an intervention takes place; students participate in a professionally relevant project experience (engineering intramural) with accompanying intermediate reflection sessions where engineering problem typology is introduced. In this paper, we present findings from analysis of the pre / post problem-solving discussions for two student pairs. This analysis is toward answering one of the motivating research questions: What effect, if any, does exposure to engineering problem typology have on students' approach to problem solving?.