Students are expected to have developed their engineering judgement throughout the course of their studies as part of their accreditation requirements (as stipulated by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology for example), and yet conceptually it is often ill-defined and therefore difficult to teach. This work was carried out in an…

Background: To prepare engineers who can address complex sociotechnical problems, a deep understanding of engineers' complex problem-solving approaches is needed. Purpose/Hypothesis: This study operationalizes comprehensive systems thinking as an analysis framework that attends to aspects of engineering work and relationships among those aspects.…

Engineering education has slowly been making its way into schools with the aim of promoting engineering literacy, which is central to learning and working in a technology-oriented society. Educators and policy makers advocate the need for developing students' understanding of the nature of engineering (NOE); yet, there is an ongoing debate on the…

The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study was to investigate the perceptions of early career engineers regarding leadership competency development within the undergraduate engineering curricula. Participants were selected using purposeful, convenience, and snowball sampling. Study participants represented the early career engineering…

Higher engineering education programmes increasingly include courses characterised by real-world problems and student collaboration in multidisciplinary teams. Research findings demonstrate that students remain limited in perceiving and meaningfully bridging disciplinary differences in these course contexts. Drawing on the literature on boundaries…

Background: Engineering's introduction into K-12 classrooms has been purported to support meaningful and inclusive learning environments. However, teachers must contend with dominant discourses embedded in US schooling that justify inequitable distributions of resources. Purpose: Drawing on Gee's notion of discourses, we examine how teachers…

Background: Undergraduate students consistently struggle with mastering concepts related to thermodynamics. Prior work has shown that haptic technology and intensive hands-on workshops help improve learning outcomes relative to traditional lecture-based thermodynamics instruction. The current study takes a more feasible approach to improving…

Background: Since the advent of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), there has been an increasing focus on engineering in K-12 education. As educators and researchers have gained a better understanding of the nature of engineering in the decade following the release of the NGSS, there are new opportunities for growth and complexity.…

Background: A defining characteristic of expertise is the use of intuition to navigate tasks. The construct of intuition and its importance is well-studied in other disciplines, but little is known about how it translates to engineering. Existing literature on intuition does not clearly define the construct and its relationship to problem solving,…

Contribution: Longitudinal video reflections are a unique approach to assessing student learning in study abroad. This study utilizes this method to understand the experiences of ten engineering students. The results show how their learning experiences changed over time and how the students connected these experiences to culture and engineering.…

Design processes can be decomposed into several steps, including information acquisition and application. Retrieving prior knowledge and experience is an important method of acquiring design information, thus designers' precedents retrieval styles reflect their design thinking. The obvious difference between industrial (ID) and mechanical design…

Construction, one of the largest industries in the world, consistently underperforms and faces barriers in leveraging the full potential of applying analytics to sensor data due to a lack of a skilled workforce. The prospects for data-driven solutions to address emerging construction challenges and enhance performance across project life cycles…

Given its ongoing struggles at attaining demographic diversity and its key role in nations' economies, the engineering workforce receives considerable attention from researchers and policymakers. Yet, prior studies and STEM recruitment initiatives have often underemphasized the variety among available engineering jobs and careers. It therefore…

Background: Engineers are socialized to value rational approaches to problem solving. A lack of awareness of how engineers use different decision-making approaches is problematic because it perpetuates the ongoing development of inequitable engineering designs and contributes to a lack of inclusion in the field. Although researchers have explored…

Contribution: Although a limited number of studies have compared textbooks used in introductory science courses (ISCs) and technical engineering courses (TECs), such a study has not been conducted regarding the Laplace transform (LT). The LT is one of the important topics that electrical engineering students learn as part of their undergraduate…