2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This full-length theory paper reports on the results of a systematic review of the literature related to troubleshooting in engineering education. Troubleshooting is a vital problem-solving skill for successful engineering practice in many disciplines, and various studies have been conducted to investigate different aspects of student troubleshooting in educational contexts. In this paper, we synthesize and present findings on the landscape of research about troubleshooting in science and engineering education contexts. Then, based on that, we identify apparent gaps in the literature, provide suggestions for future research in this area, and discuss implications for instructional design that seeks to implement troubleshooting in undergraduate engineering settings. This paper intends to supplement and update prior reviews of empirical troubleshooting research – namely, the ones conducted by Morris and Rouse in 1985 and by Rivera-Reyes and Boyles in 2013.

This paper focuses on empirical studies related to troubleshooting in science and engineering education, as well as research papers that describe curricular troubleshooting interventions. This literature review was conducted systematically by following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines using the Covidence literature review platform. The information sources we searched to identify troubleshooting studies included search engines, digital libraries, and databases such as: Google Scholar, Engineering Village (Compendex and Inspec), ERIC, Education Source (EBSCO), IEEE Xplore, ASEE PEER, JSTOR, and SpringerLink. We limited the scope of this review to papers published from 1980 to 2024. Documents that focus solely on troubleshooting theory or serve as technical troubleshooting guides, training manuals, or otherwise explain how to maintain/repair a specific technical system, device, product, or service were excluded. Searching yielded an initial set of 453 papers, which were filtered using those criteria, resulting in 52 papers retained, which we then extracted relevant information from and characterized.

Analysis of retained papers considered: how researchers define troubleshooting (both as a problem typology and problem-solving process); how they ground it in theory (if any); the ways it has been implemented and studied in educational contexts; which aspects of it have been empirically investigated; which contexts, participants, and data types/collection methods have been involved in studies; and specific metrics used for evaluating student troubleshooting skills and performance. Four of our findings stand out most. First, there is a need to study student troubleshooting in multiple engineering disciplines, since the majority of studies in this area have been conducted in the context of electrical engineering and closely related fields. Second, there is a need to study undergraduate students’ troubleshooting processes more granularly – namely, the strategies and approaches they use to attempt/solve troubleshooting problems, specific difficulties they might encounter while troubleshooting, and stages of the troubleshooting process they may struggle with most. Third, there is a general lack of grounding/framing in established and relevant troubleshooting theory among papers we considered. Fourth, future studies (and instructional implementation) should utilize more holistic methods for assessing students’ troubleshooting skills that provide more insight into their proficiencies and deficiencies – not just whether they could solve the problem or not, how many they could solve, or the time it took them to do so.