2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering judgment, a critical competency in professional practice, involves decision-making under uncertainty with incomplete information. Despite its significance, there are limited theoretical frameworks for understanding the cognitive processes underlying this complex skill. Consequently, engineering educators lack insight into how engineering judgment develops in students and manifests in their actions. This paper argues that studying students’ epistemic cognition presents a novel approach to understanding engineering judgment.

Engineering judgment combines technical knowledge, experience, and intuition to make sound decisions in complex, ambiguous situations. It requires balancing constraints and adapting general principles to specific scenarios. It involves critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making under uncertainty, requiring engineers to balance multiple, often conflicting, constraints and objectives. This makes engineering judgment central in engineering practice because it can be seen as the bridge between theory and application in real-world scenarios. Accordingly, the development of engineering judgment marks the transition from novice to expert engineer and is continually refined through experience and reflection.

Engineering judgment is difficult to teach and assess through traditional educational methods, but current research suggests that it develops through experience and reflective practice. However, there are limited models describing the cognitive processes involved, including how different factors (e.g., domain knowledge, problem-solving strategies, metacognition) interact in engineering judgment. This blurs the relationship between it and other cognitive processes, like critical thinking and design thinking. Further, pedagogical challenges persist in developing and assessing this skill, compounded by variability across engineering disciplines and contexts.

Epistemic cognition – how individuals conceptualize knowledge and knowing processes – offers a promising framework to address these gaps. It parallels engineering judgment in dealing with uncertainty, integrating multiple knowledge sources, and evaluating information reliability. Applying epistemic cognition theories to engineering judgment provides insights into complex decision-making processes, differences between novice and expert judgment, and its development over time.

This paper explores this connection using students’ responses to an end-of-year questionnaire about engineering judgment from an undergraduate experiment-focused lab. We highlight the alignment between epistemic cognition theories and engineering decision-making, suggest potential research directions, and discuss implications for engineering education. This approach may offer new avenues for understanding and fostering this crucial engineering skill.