Search for: All records

This full paper seeks to characterize how gender and career-related identity may affect a practicing engineer’s description of their expertise. This work is situated within a larger effort to disentangle the construct of intuition from expertise in engineering. Our findings will inform further data collection and analysis by shedding light on gender and career-related identity as potential confounding variables. Numerous models of expertise development note intuition as important or essential, yet intuition as a construct has yet to be defined, particularly within an engineering context. From literature on expertise development and cognition, we have synthesized a proposed definition of engineering intuition as the ability to assess solutions and predict outcomes in a timely manner. Our larger study is focused on developing an emergent characterization of engineering intuition informed by perceptions of practicing engineers, allowing us to disentangle intuition from expertise and identify its characteristics and co-dependent constructs. We also seek to characterize salient differences between demographic groups, and in the work presented here we focus on gender and whether the individual has had a significant role change in their career to date. We define a significant role change specifically as the transition from a technical role to a managerial role. 

Engineering judgement has become an increasingly more important skill for engineers as engineering problem solving has grown more complex and reliant on technology. Judging the feasibility of solutions is required to solve 21st century problems, making this an essential 21st century engineering skill. Those tasked with preparing the future engineering workforce should avoid educating students to become rote learners who simply take output at face value without critical analysis. Engineering educators need to instead focus efforts toward developing students with improved engineering judgement, specifically engineering intuition. The project is focused on the following four research questions: 1) What are practicing professional engineers’ perceptions of discipline specific intuition and its use in the workplace? 2) Where does intuition manifest in expert engineer decision-making and problem-solving processes? 3) How does the motivation and identity of practicing professional engineers relate to discipline-specific intuition? 4) What would an instrument designed to validly and reliably measure engineering intuition look like? The idea or notion of engineering intuition is based in literature from nursing (Smith) and management (Simon) and links expert development to intuition (Dreyfus). This literature is used to support the hypothesis that engineering intuition is defined as the ability to: 1) assess whether engineering solutions are reasonable or ridiculous, and 2) predict outcomes and/or options within an engineering scenario. We seek to answer research questions 1-3 using interviews with engineering practitioners at various stages in their careers (early to retired). These interviews will allow us to construct a modified definition of engineering intuition and identify related constructs. These results will be leveraged to subsequently create an instrument to reliably measure intuition. The ultimate goal of this project is to use what is learned via research to create classroom practices that improve students’ ability to develop, recognize, and improve their own engineering intuition. Select References: Dreyfus, Stuart E., and Hubert L. Dreyfus. A five-stage model of the mental activities involved in directed skill acquisition. No. ORC-80-2. California Univ Berkeley Operations Research Center, 1980. Smith, Anita. "Exploring the legitimacy of intuition as a form of nursing knowledge." Nursing Standard (through 2013) 23.40 (2009): 35. Simon, Herbert A. "Making management decisions: The role of intuition and emotion." Academy of Management Perspectives 1.1 (1987): 57-64. 

Engineering judgement has become an increasingly more important skill for engineers as engineering problem solving has grown more complex and reliant on technology. Judging the feasibility of solutions is required to solve 21st century problems, making this an essential 21st century engineering skill. Those tasked with preparing the future engineering workforce should avoid educating students to become rote learners who simply take output at face value without critical analysis. Engineering educators need to instead focus efforts toward developing students with improved engineering judgement, specifically engineering intuition. The project is focused on the following four research questions: 1) What are practicing professional engineers’ perceptions of discipline specific intuition and its use in the workplace? 2) Where does intuition manifest in expert engineer decision-making and problem-solving processes? 3) How does the motivation and identity of practicing professional engineers relate to discipline-specific intuition? 4) What would an instrument designed to validly and reliably measure engineering intuition look like? The idea or notion of engineering intuition is based in literature from nursing (Smith) and management (Simon) and links expert development to intuition (Dreyfus). This literature is used to support the hypothesis that engineering intuition is defined as the ability to: 1) assess whether engineering solutions are reasonable or ridiculous, and 2) predict outcomes and/or options within an engineering scenario. We seek to answer research questions 1-3 using interviews with engineering practitioners at various stages in their careers (early to retired). These interviews will allow ability to develop, recognize, and improve their own engineering intuition. Select References: Dreyfus, Stuart E., and Hubert L. Dreyfus. A five-stage model of the mental activities involved in directed skill acquisition. No. ORC-80-2. California Univ Berkeley Operations Research Center, 1980. Smith, Anita. "Exploring the legitimacy of intuition as a form of nursing knowledge." Nursing Standard (through 2013) 23.40 (2009): 35. Simon, Herbert A. "Making management decisions: The role of intuition and emotion." Academy of Management Perspectives 1.1 (1987): 57-64. 

This full paper seeks to characterize how gender and career-related identity may affect a practicing engineer’s description of their expertise. This work is situated within a larger effort to disentangle the construct of intuition from expertise in engineering. Our findings will inform further data collection and analysis by shedding light on gender and career-related identity as potential confounding variables. Numerous models of expertise development note intuition as important or essential, yet intuition as a construct has yet to be defined, particularly within an engineering context. From literature on expertise development and cognition, we have synthesized a proposed definition of engineering intuition as the ability to assess solutions and predict outcomes in a timely manner. Our larger study is focused on developing an emergent characterization of engineering intuition informed by perceptions of practicing engineers, allowing us to disentangle intuition from expertise and identify its characteristics and co-dependent constructs. We also seek to characterize salient differences between demographic groups, and in the work presented here we focus on gender and whether the individual has had a significant role change in their career to date. We define a significant role change specifically as the transition from a technical role to a managerial role.