2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering students must develop problem-solving skills as a foundation to build on the ABET student learning outcomes, especially 1 and 2, asking for abilities to “identify, formulate and solve complex engineering problems…” and “apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs…” Therefore, it is relevant to nurture students’ problem-solving skills. This study assesses students’ problem-solving style improvement (using the terminology proposed by Zurilla et al. (2009)) after addressing an open-ended engineering design problem in a Computer Programming class, and it is compared to an approach in which students are given a close-ended problem. For assessing students’ problem-solving styles, students were asked to take the social problem-solving survey developed by Zurilla et al. (2009) on the first week of classes as a pre-test and then at the end of the course as a post-test. Zurilla et al.’s survey provides a score for students’ problem-solving styles such as Avoidance, impulsivity, Positive Problem Orientation, and Rational Problem Solving, among others. In this study, students who received the intervention (open-ended design project) took the class in the spring and fall of 2021, and the control group (close-ended programming project assignment) were the students who took the course in the spring and fall of 2022. The same instructor taught all the sections. Preliminary results show higher values in the problem-solving styles Positive Problem Orientation and Rational Problem solving in students’ courses where they completed an open-ended design project than in the condition in which students were asked to address a close-ended problem.