2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Students often face difficulties in transferring concepts, knowledge and skills between their courses. This difficulty is especially true of the fundamental math and science courses that are often taught outside the major of the student and without engineering context. At the same time, graduating engineers are moving into an increasingly interdisciplinary workplace that values the ability to work broadly across a range of contexts. More work is needed to better prepare students to adapt their knowledge and skills to new situations and to demonstrate how the various courses and concepts within their curricula relate.

In this study, we ask students, teaching assistants and faculty to “think aloud” through their solution to a statics problem that requires mathematical knowledge to be transferred in order to be solved. Two faculty, two teaching assistants and seven undergraduate students are interviewed as they think aloud through the problem. Interview transcripts and solutions to the statics problem are then examined for themes and patterns in responses in order to draw conclusions about the challenges different populations face in transferring knowledge and solving such problems.

Observations indicated that students could apply simple integration skills to find the area of a shape when given a curve describing its shape, but could not use integration to find the centroid. The participants did however recall being taught how to calculate centroids in the past and discussed a lack of usage of this skill causing their inability to recall it correctly. Student participants in general displayed simple approaches to problem solving based on reading the problem statement rather than following an engineering approach starting with governing equations. A potential barrier to problem solving success was identified in the varying symbols used by different research participants which could lead to a lack of understanding if these symbols are not clearly explained and defined in a classroom setting.

Future work will further examine these themes, as well as developing prompts and activities to promote knowledge transfer and problem solving success.