2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This CAREER project seeks to further our understanding of the experience-intuition-expertise relationship and apply that knowledge to develop practice-informed educational initiatives that support the professional formation of engineers by promoting discussion of intuition. Intuition is a critical skill of experts that has been studied in nursing, business management, and law. A previously funded NSF Research in the Formation of Engineers (RIEF) project extended the study of discipline-specific intuition to engineering, resulting in a definition of engineering intuition and framework situating intuition in engineering practice. This previous work describes how experience builds the skill of intuition, but neglects to address the positive or negative feedback loops created by experience that can influence intuition use leading to the first research aim of this CAREER project: Characterize the ways in which engineering practitioners understand experience to influence intuition development and use. Aim 1 will be achieved through a phenomenography that seeks to capture the outcome space of experiences as they relate to development and use of intuition, followed by narrative analysis that returns focus to individual or composite narratives. Outcomes of Aim 1 will directly inform the first goal of the Education Plan: developing and piloting a student-facing Practitioner Voices Series that highlights different experiential pathways through practitioner narratives. Currently in year one, this paper reports largely on the methods development of Aim 1 as we kick off the research efforts.