Engineering Education and Problem Solving (Page 2 of 2)
(Cont'd from page 1)
Seventy-one percent of the respondents agreed with the statements that culture can impact the speed of problem solving or the nature of the solution or both. Yet, only 15% indicated having a lecture or more of formal training on the impact of culture on team problem solving. Eighty-six percent of the respondents had participated in at least two group problem solving exercises. Of those who had participated in at least one group problem solving exercise 68% indicated that the most common method for selecting teams seemed to be random, unknown, based on availability or based on who knows who (36%).
Thirteen percent of the respondents indicated that they had had one or more lectures on cognitive biases and 67% had had no training on cognitive biases. A more engineering-oriented version of the “green” and “blue” taxi problem was created and the respondents were asked to quickly work through the problem and provide an answer. Here is the problem statement:
Historical data collected over a period of three years showed that a waste water tank contains some liquid 85% of the time and is empty (or dry) the remaining 15% of the time. An accident involving the waste water tank happened at the start of a plant turn around when most of the digital instrumentation was off line. An old field instrument (manual-mode) (on the tank) indicated that the tank was empty (or dry) at the time of the accident. However, later the investigators found the prediction of the old field instrument to be correct only 80% of the time. Given the old field instrument indication (or claim) that the tank was empty, what are the chances that the tank was actually empty at the time of the accident?
The correct answer is 41%. Only nine percent picked the correct answer. Fifty-five percent picked either 12% or 68%. Those two answer choices are obtained by a simple multiplication of probabilities.