Impact of decision-making in heat transfer courses on students’ ability to solve authentic problems

This Research Full Paper presents a study of problem-solving skills in heat transfer courses. Although engineering programs stress the importance of teaching problem-solving skills, there are frequently reported gaps between the skills graduating engineers have and what employers want. Part of the reason for this gap is that many of the problems students solve, particularly in engineering science courses like thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, bear little resemblance to the authentic, unstructured problems they will be expected to solve as engineers. Previous work in problem-solving has been limited by a lack of a framework to describe how experts solve authentic problems, and a lack of assessments to measure authentic problem-solving. We have developed an assessment of problem-solving skills in the context of heat transfer to measure how well undergraduate engineering students are learning to solve authentic problems. We measured changes in students’ problem-solving over the course of one chemical engineering heat transfer course and one biological engineering heat transfer course. Although students made improvements in some areas, the average student scores didn’t change significantly for two-thirds of the questions on our assessment. Differences between the two courses can be explained by what decisions students practiced during the course. These results suggest that undergraduate students need more deliberate practice making the decisions that expert engineers do as they solve authentic problems. We hope to encourage other educators to use this assessment in their courses to measure how well they are preparing their students to solve real-world engineering problems.