Predicting and Evaluating Engineering Problem Solving (PEEPS): Instrument Development

CONTEXT Judging the feasibility of solutions has become an increasingly important engineering skill as engineering problem solving has become more complex and technology-dependent. Engineering education must take care to foster engineering judgement in our students to produce robust problem solvers primed to critically evaluate and interpret output. Our work uses expertise development and dual-cognition processing theories (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980; Smith, 2009; Simon, 1987) to frame such engineering judgement as engineering intuition or the ability to assess the outcome of an engineering solution and predict outcomes within an engineering scenario (Miskioğlu and Martin, 2019). PURPOSE OR GOAL Our overarching goal is to create classroom interventions that explicitly recognize and enhance the development of engineering intuition. Accomplishing this goal requires a means of measuring engineering intuition before and after such interventions. This paper discusses our process to develop the Predicting and Evaluating Engineering Problem Solving (PEEPS) tool for measuring engineering intuition. APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS PEEPS is built directly on our prior qualitative work with practicing engineers, which revealed the construct of engineering intuition (Aaron et al., 2020). The emergent findings were combined with questions adapted from the Concept Assessment Tool for Statics (Steif & Dantzler, 2005) to create a preliminary survey assessing intuition. Additional items asked participants to assess their level of confidence in their answers. The survey was designed such that the statics problems could be switched out for other forms of engineering problems. Think-aloud sessions were used to check face validity and usability prior to full deployment in Spring 2021. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES This study details the process used to create PEEPS. Modifications were made following 19 think aloud sessions. The initial deployment in Spring 2021 resulted in 88 completed responses with responses primarily coming from white, male, aerospace engineering students who had previously performed well in their statics courses. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY This work showcases a new survey designed to assess the engineering intuition of engineering students. Next steps include expanding the work to a more diverse sample of engineering students, further validity checks of the instrument, and pairing the instrument with newly created educational interventions designed to better foster engineering intuition development in students.