2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering judgment has long been recognized as a crucial professional skill. Recent efforts across ASEE have focused on defining judgment and assessing student achievement on judgment-eliciting tasks; however, much more work is needed to thoroughly understand this complex capability. This paper will advance the philosophy of engineering judgment in two ways. First, engineering judgment will be connected to Bernard Lonergan’s philosophy of human knowing from his book Insight. Second, Lonergan’s philosophy will be applied to interpret student data from a series of judgment-eliciting laboratories.

Lonergan describes human knowing as following four stages: experience, understanding, judgment, and decision. The stage of judgment is related to evaluating truth claims about understandings. It asks the question “is my understanding true?” Experience shows that this is often a difficult question for students to answer. Many also find it difficult to see why this question is important in the first place. This paper will present Lonergan’s philosophy and show how it can be used to present judgment to students and help them reflect on their development of this ability.

This paper is part of a project on judgment-eliciting laboratories. Eight students are currently participating in this study. These students are completing epistemic inventories and semi-structured interviews at the beginning and end of the fall semester. These data, combined with students’ work on the laboratories throughout the semester, will help answer the research question: “how do students articulate and apply their engineering judgment across a series of open-ended laboratories?” Data from this project will be explored using the framework of Bernard Lonergan.