This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)
This engineering education research award to Clemson University will employ researchers to investigate how engineering students organize prior knowledge and develop effective problem solving strategies. Tablet PCs will be used to capture a complete history of students' solution processes including all strokes and erasures. This will allow analysis of mistakes and identification of inefficient strategies and misconceptions. Since effective problem solving is fundamental to all engineering disciplines, the methods developed to analyze sequences of problem solving steps and the results of the analysis will make important contributions to cognitive science and engineering education. This work can provide guidance for curricular changes to improve student learning by developing efficient problem solving strategies and will contribute to better preparation of engineers to fill engineering jobs.
