2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

RFE: Trust but Verify: The Use of Intuition in Engineering Problem Solving - as Captured through Cognitive Task Analysis

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session II

Intuition is recognized as a defining quality of experts and used by professionals in specialized fields such as nursing, management, law, engineering, and a range of other STEM fields. Developing expertise and intuition both require experience, resulting in their co-development. Within engineering, intuition is defined as the expert’s ability to leverage past experience to subconsciously assess a solution or predict an outcome and is often used by engineering practitioners when they are under pressure from constraints (e.g., lack of time). Practicing engineers rely on engineering intuition to solve problems, but intuition use is often discouraged in undergraduate education. This gap between professional practice and educational norms limits our ability to prepare the future engineering workforce and demonstrates our limited understanding of engineering intuition. In this Research in the Formation of Engineers (RFE) grant, we build on previous work that defined engineering intuition to investigate how engineering practitioners apply intuition and work towards narrowing the gap between problem solving in engineering practice and education. We have focused our work on two specific research questions:

RQ1: How does the application of intuition manifest in engineering problem solving?
RQ2: How does prior engineering experience influence the application of intuition when approaching engineering problems?

Authors

Dr. Kaela M Martin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2359-6332 Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University - Prescott [biography]

Kaela Martin is an Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott Campus. She graduated from Purdue University with a PhD in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. Her research interests in engineering education include developing classroom interventions that improve student learning, designing experiences to further the development of students from novices to experts, and creating engaging classroom experiences.
Dr. Elif Miskioglu Bucknell University [biography]

Dr. Elif Miskioglu is a mid-career engineering education scholar and educator. She holds a B.S. ˘
in Chemical Engineering (with Genetics minor) from Iowa State University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in
Chemical Engineering from Ohio State University. Her early Ph.D. work focused on the development of
bacterial biosensors capable of screening pesticides for specifically targeting the malaria vector mosquito,
Anopheles gambiae. As a result, her diverse background also includes experience in infectious disease
and epidemiology, providing crucial exposure to the broader context of engineering problems and their
subsequent solutions. These diverse experiences and a growing passion for improving engineering education prompted Dr. Miskioglu to change her career path and become a scholar of engineering education. ˘
As an educator, she is committed to challenging her students to uncover new perspectives and dig deeper
into the context of the societal problems engineering is intended to solve. As a scholar, she seeks to not
only contribute original theoretical research to the field, but work to bridge the theory-to-practice gap in
engineering education by serving as an ambassador for empirically driven educational
practices.
Anu Singh The Ohio State University [biography]

Anu Singh is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. She earned her PhD in Engineering, with a specialization in Engineering Education Research, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research focuses on engineering students' critical thinking skills, argumentation, and epistemological beliefs, with the goal of supporting their development of competencies that extend beyond technical expertise.
Dr. Adam R Carberry http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0041-7060 The Ohio State University [biography]

Dr. Adam R. Carberry is Professor and Chair in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University (OSU). He earned a B.S. in Materials Science Engineering from Alfred University, and received his M.S. and Ph.D., both from Tufts University, in Chemistry and Engineering Education respectively. He recently joined OSU after having served as an Associate Professor in The Polytechnic School within Arizona State University’s Fulton Schools of Engineering (FSE) where he was the Graduate Program Chair for the Engineering Education Systems & Design (EESD) Ph.D. Program. He is currently a Deputy Editor for the Journal of Engineering Education and co-maintains the Engineering Education Community Resource wiki. Additional career highlights include serving as Chair of the Research in Engineering Education Network (REEN), visiting École Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Rabat, Morocco as a Fulbright Specialist, receiving an FSE Top 5% Teaching Award, receiving an ASEE Educational Research and Methods Division Apprentice Faculty Award, receiving a Frontiers in Education New Faculty Award, and being named an ASEE Fellow.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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