(134g) Process Design Versus Product Design: A Comparison of Student Problem-Solving Skills across Capstone Design Courses

Problem-solving is consistently cited as the most important technical skill that engineers learn during their undergraduate education. However, research suggests that students may not be learning how to solve the challenging and complex problems they will encounter in the workplace. Research on solving such “authentic” problems has been limited by: (1) the lack of an empirical framework for how expert engineers solve authentic problems and (2) the lack of any assessments that measure authentic problem-solving. In previous work, we developed an empirical framework of authentic problem-solving through semi-structured interviews with experts scientists and engineers from a variety of technical disciplines. This framework represents authentic problem solving as a set of decisions that experts make, guided by a cognitive construct we call a “predictive framework,” which allows experts to explain observations, make predictions, and conduct mental simulations. We then developed an assessment in the context of chemical process design that requires participants to make some of these expert decisions and use these predictive frameworks, thus representing a measure of authentic problem solving. We use this assessment to quantitatively measure differences in problem-solving outcomes between two different capstone design courses at a large, private research university – one in product design, and one in plant design. Preliminary results suggest that students in the plant design course produce superior process design schematics, but that students in both courses are equally poor at identifying important features of the problem, and evaluating information that is relevant to solving the problem.