Engineering Education and Problem Solving Survey Results
Many thanks to all the students and engineers who participated in the survey. Special thanks to Dean Joseph Tedesco (University of Houston), Professor G.D. Yadav (UICT, Mumbai), Professor Kesava Rao Kaza (IIS, Bengaluru), Professor Lance Lobban (University of Oklahoma), Professor Mark Fowler (SUNY Binghamton), Professor Lee Fleming (UC Berkeley), Professor Martin Barstow (University of Leicester, UK), Lucero Ramirez (Mexico), Anne Peters, David Jones, J Brian Hart, Hector Salzar, Luis Andres Rodriguez, Jorge Trespalacios.
A total of 125 responses were received. Since undergraduate engineering education was the intended focus of the survey and since some questions asked the respondents to use their memory, 26 responses were excluded from the final analysis. The respondents had had their undergraduate degrees from universities in the United States, India, South America, Western Europe, China, etc.
Seventy-nine percent of the respondents were familiar with or had used the root cause analysis method. Eighty-five percent of the respondents had had one minute or less of any training on the role of emotions such as fear in problem solving. Eighty-three percent of respondents indicated that they had one minute or less of training on the role of working memory in problem solving. One question asked the students to indicated TRUE or FALSE to a claim that negative affective states are not useful in any step of a multi-step problem solving process. The respondents were split 55% to 45% in favor FALSE. This did not match what we had observed in the classrooms. So we analyzed the survey responses to that question by region of the world. Eighty-five percent of respondents from Colombia selected “True” and matched our classroom observation. Two techniques, nominal group technique (15%) and triage (14%) used mainly for prioritizing problems, had the lowest ratings on the familiarity and use scale.