2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

It is well-established that students have difficulty transferring theory and skills between courses in their undergraduate curriculum. At the same time, many college-level courses only concern material relating to the course itself and do not cover how this material might be used elsewhere. It is unsurprising, then, that students are unable to transfer and integrate knowledge from multiple areas into new problems as part of capstone design courses, for example, or in their careers. More work is required to better enable students to transfer knowledge between their courses, learn skills and theory more deeply, and to form engineers who are better able to adapt to new situations and solve “systems-level” problems.

Various authors in both the cognitive and disciplinary sciences have discussed these difficulties with the transfer of knowledge, and noted the need to develop tools and techniques for promoting knowledge transfer, as well as to help students develop cross-course connections. This work aimed to address these barriers to knowledge transfer, and crucially develop the needed activities and practices for promoting transfer by answering the following research questions: (1) What are the primary challenges experienced by students when tasked with transferring theory and skills from prior courses, specifically mathematics and physics? (2) What methods of prior knowledge activation are most effective in enabling students to apply this prior knowledge in new areas of study?

In this paper we present a holistic summary of the work completed under this award. Initially, findings from a series of n=23 think aloud interviews, in which participants were asked to solve a typical engineering statics problem, is presented. These interviews evidenced multiple barriers to knowledge transfer (lack of prior knowledge, accuracy of prior knowledge, conceptual understanding, lack of teaching of applications, language of problem, curricular mapping) that hindered participant success in terms of using their mathematical skills to solve the problem.
Findings also indicated the importance of reflective thinking on behalf of the participants to their problem solving success.

Based on this initial work using think alouds, a further set of interviews (n=8) were conducted to more deeply examine student conceptions of important mathematical topics that are transferred into engineering such as integration and centroids. Findings indicated that participant knowledge and understanding of centroids in particular was generally based around more intuitive or geometrical conceptions rather than concrete physical or mathematical models. Following up on the initial study of problem solving, the importance of reflection on behalf of the problem solver was also examined in more detail. Comparison of expert (faculty) and novice (student) approaches to problem solving demonstrates 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 seen to be a differentiating factor in their approach as compared to novices.

Similar to this paper, the associated poster presentation will cover a holistic representation of the findings of this study.