Investigating the Transferability of the Productive Beginnings of Engineering Judgment Framework from Statics to Dynamics

This research paper examines students' productive beginnings of engineering judgement while solving open-ended problems in a second-year dynamics course. Undergraduate students are typically assigned well-structured textbook problems for homework, in which the systems have already been simplified and there are few, if any, open-ended decisions to be made. Therefore, students have few opportunities in class to practice their engineering judgment until capstone design courses. We have developed a framework of the productive beginnings of engineering judgment with data from open-ended modeling problems in statics courses. In this paper we investigate how the framework transfers to open-ended modeling problems in dynamics courses. This analysis suggests our framework is transferable to dynamics courses, with all fourteen types of judgement found in the dynamics data set and no additional ways of engaging in judgement were found.