Understanding the challenges students experience solving an ill-structured problem

Recently there have been multiple calls to improve undergraduate engineering education and incorporate high-impact practices through the undergraduate curriculum. Within engineering education, one method to address these calls is to provide students with the opportunity to solve ill-structured problems throughout their undergraduate studies. The goals of this work are to present an ill-structured problem assignment that was used within a first-year physics course for engineering students and the outcomes of a preliminary research study to understand the challenges students face when solving an ill-structured problem. The problem assignment gave students the opportunity to write and solve an ill-structured problem of their choice related to the course context. For the research study, we analyzed students' responses to open-ended survey questions to understand how students approached specific aspects of the assignment and what they found challenging. We identified how students selected a phenomenon to analyze, what methods they selected to gather information to answer the question, why they selected these methods, and the parts of the assignment they found the easiest and most challenging. The outcomes of this work can inform future iterations of the assignment, scaffolding to support students as they solve ill-structured problems, and general course instruction.