2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background
There is broad evidence that engineers are ill-prepared for the workplace. One common assumption is engineering education is that if students know the concepts very well they will be able to apply them in engineering practice. However, widely utilized and studied theories of situated cognition suggest that learning is highly contextual; we remember and organize knowledge based on how it was learned. This contradicts the assumption that conceptual understand is of primary importance.

Research Goals
The goal of this study is to investigate the representation of structural engineering concepts specific to structural design in both civil engineering practice and academic settings through robust, in-depth, and iterative educational research methodologies. We achieved this goal with two studies. The first is to understand and compare the representation of structural engineering concepts in structural design within authentic workplace and academic settings. The second is to iteratively develop problems and solutions that structural engineers and faculty deem as authentic to building design, and that faculty are willing to adopt into their curriculum and to study this development process with a focus on barriers and affordance to adoption of authentic engineering problems.

Methods
We investigated how these concepts are represented in engineering practice and academic settings by participating in and observing a structural engineering workplace and structural engineering courses using ethnographically informed research methods, including participant observation, formal and informal interviews, and document analysis.

We developed problems and solutions through an iterative process of meetings with engineers and faculty, developing the problems as meetings progressed and asking engineers in what ways the problem represented engineering practice and asking faculty if and why they were willing to adopt the problem. Semi-structured interviews with faculty and engineering practitioners and faculty led to the iterative development of three design activities. The development of the design activities acted as a mediating task to understand more about the meaning of an answer, epistemic beliefs related to engineering knowledge, and potential barriers to adoption. Inductive in-vivo codes and thematic analysis were used to analyze the interviews.

Results
Findings noted that workplace representations of structural engineering concepts tended to be more tangible to real world conditions, project/stakeholder constraints, and engineering tools/heuristics than academic representations of the same concepts. Furthermore, engineering tools and heuristics in the academic environments were typically profession-based and applied in a prescriptive manner; whereas in the workplace environment there were more tools and heuristics that were practice-based and applied in more evaluative ways.

Results from the iterative problem development show that the utility of an answer is similar to research on tangibility where the outcome of a “real” design is meant to have utility and be practical and is directly related to the needs of either the academic or workplace context. Faculty aligned with the answer-based approach theme where emphasis is placed on meeting course learning outcomes and having “pluggable” approaches to build student confidence and simplify grading. Practitioners aligned more with the solution-based approach theme where emphasis is placed on meeting stakeholder needs that are highly contextual and solutions require more than just technical work.

Conclusions

Results from our ethnographic research support the idea that knowledge is contextual and learning in practice is not necessarily conceptual in nature. We furthered this research by defining tangibility and how it is present and academic and workplace contexts. Results from the iterative problem development indicated differing views of knowledge of academics and practioners and these differences may help explain barriers to adoption. The concept of tangibility combined with epistemology may be utilized to further development and adoption of more real-world engineering problems into the engineering curriculum.