2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Within the profession, there is a desire for graduating engineers to be “T-shaped” professionals who have a deep subject knowledge (the vertical of the “T”), with the ability to apply that knowledge across a broad range of contexts (the horizontal of the “T”). The ability to transfer knowledge between courses in the undergraduate curriculum, and then into one’s career, is, therefore, an important skill that should be developed in engineering curricula.

Based on prior work in this area, and with the goal of developing adaptive problem solvers who can transfer their knowledge across a range of contexts, we compare the problem solving approaches taken by both experts (faculty) and novices (students) when faced with problems that require knowledge to be transferred in order to be solved. Transcripts and artifacts generated through a series of think aloud protocols are analyzed using an a priori coding scheme and thematic analysis based around a sense-making framework of knowledge transfer.

A comparison of expert (faculty) and novice (student) approaches to problem solving demonstrated how often experts reflect on their progress during the solving process and the manner in which they are able to connect problems in one context to similar problems they have encountered in the past in other areas of engineering. The ability of experts to “chunk” problems into smaller stages and reflect on individual elements of the problem at hand, rather than the problem as a whole, was also observed to be a differentiating factor in their approach as compared to novices.