2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper presents one of the findings from a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research project aimed at enhancing engineering and mathematics (EM) education. The research project specifically focuses on the role that students’ self-regulation in action (SRA) and metacognitive knowledge about tasks (MKT) play during problem-solving activities. To gain insight into academic problem-solving practices, the study examines how undergraduate students enrolled in second-year engineering and mathematics (EM) courses (Engineering Statics and Ordinary Differential Equations) use their MKT to navigate problem-solving challenges while concurrently monitoring and evaluating their cognitive processes.
Twenty undergraduate students (7 female and 13 male) from a land-grant university in the western United States participated in one-on-one semi-structured interviews and practiced the think-aloud protocol (TAP) during problem-solving sessions to generate qualitative data. The students were tasked to solve four subject-specific problems in engineering and mathematics (EM) courses. In total, twenty students generated eighty problems throughout the study, comprising forty problems (20 easy and 20 difficult) produced at the beginning of the semester and an additional forty problems (20 easy and 20 difficult) generated at the end of the semester that were analyzed using constant comparative analysis (CCA) technique.
The analysis included two coding phases: initial codes that represent the raw data and focused codes that reveal the seven key problem-solving patterns within the dataset. Based on this analysis, the seven patterns were organized into four quadrants, classified according to high/low levels of metacognitive knowledge about the task (MKT) and high/low levels of self-regulation in action (SRA). This paper specifically examines the first quadrant, which is indicative of impeccable learning episodes.
Students in this quadrant demonstrated a deep understanding of the tasks, accurate self-evaluation, and effective monitoring, leading to appropriate problem-solving strategies and successful results. These findings highlight that student who engaged in impeccable learning episodes demonstrated a thorough comprehension of the tasks, enabling them to effectively self-regulate their actions. These results have important implications for educational strategies meant to develop students’ MKT and SRA to improve their problem-solving abilities. A brief discussion is included at the end of the paper.