How Students Take Up Open-ended, Real World Problems

This work-in-progress research paper describes the different ways in which undergraduate engineering students reasoned about the goals of an open-ended problem, and how this influenced the way they solved the problem. Typical homework assigned to students in engineering science courses is often well-defined textbook problems, which are very different from the ill-defined problems professional engineers solve in the workplace. Our research team has been assigning ill-defined problems in introductory engineering science courses in order to give students opportunities to engage in engineering judgement, thereby better preparing them for professional practice. This study examines how students decide to take up an open-ended problem, meaning their sense of the goals of the problem, and how this influences their actions when solving the problem. The results also include an analysis of the reasons students indicated they took up the open-ended problem in different ways.