This
Empirical Research proposal submitted
to the Measurement, Modeling and Methods
category of the Frontiers Research
strand presents the case for a project that investigates how science and
engineering students build toward problem solving expertise through a major part
of the academic careers and how they transfer their knowledge and skills across
undergraduate STEM courses while building that expertise.
Most professional scientists build
problem solving expertise through years of undergraduate STEM courses by
starting with relatively simple and structured problems in introductory courses
and progressing to more complex and unstructured problems in upper-division
courses.
These academic experiences help prepare them to become
creative problem solvers in their future professional life.
While problem solving and the mediating factors have
been studied in various formal and informal learning contexts, the process of
development and change in the level of problem solving expertise over the
duration of a scientist’s or engineer’s undergraduate experience has not been
carefully studied.
Further, research has not yet investigated how
problem solving skills transfer through a series of STEM courses to provide a
set of coherent experiences that helps develop the students’ overall problem
solving expertise.
Thus, we do not yet know what can be done to
optimize the learning trajectory toward problem solving expertise by preparing
research-based coherent experiences across several courses.
Our project is a step in creating a knowledge base on the evolution of students’ problem solving skills over the span of three years of STEM courses. We investigate the development and transfer of problem solving skills in undergraduate mathematics, physics and engineering courses. First we use individual semi-structured interviews to capture fine grained data about individual student’s problem solving. Based on these insights we enhance an adaptive online system to collect data from large numbers of students and map students’ learning trajectories as they build toward problem solving expertise. In each phase, we conduct longitudinal as well as cross-sectional studies in multiple courses in mathematics, physics and engineering. Over three years we will investigate problem solving by over 3000 students in seven different courses in mathematics, physics and engineering.