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Engineering judgment is critical to both engineering education and engineering practice, and the ability to practice or participate in engineering judgment is often considered central to the formation of professional engineering identities. In practice, engineers must make difficult judgments that evaluate potentially competing objectives, ambiguity, uncertainty, incomplete information, and evolving technical knowledge. Nonetheless, while engineering judgment is implicit in engineering work and so central to identification with the profession, educators and practitioners have few actionable frameworks to employ when considering how to develop and assess this capacity in students. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework designed to inform both educators and researchers that positions engineering judgment at the intersection of the cognitive dimensions of naturalistic decision-making, and discursive dimensions of identity. Our proposed theory positions engineering judgment not only as an individual capacity practiced by individual engineers alone but also as the capacity to position oneself within the discursive community so as to participate in the construction of engineering judgments among a group of professionals working together. Our theory draws on several strands of existing research to theorize a working framework for engineering judgment that considers the cognitive processes associated with making judgments and the inextricable discursive practices associated with negotiating those judgments in context. In constructing this theory, we seek to provide engineering education practitioners and researchers with a framework that can inform the design of assignments, curricula, or experiences that are intended to foster students’ participation in the development and practice of engineering judgment. 

In this paper, we argue that the exploration of engineering judgment in undergraduate education should be grounded at the intersection of decision making, situated cognition, and engineering identity production. In our view, engineering judgment is an embodied cognitive process that is situated in written and oral communication, involved with immediate praxis, and takes place within the contexts of standards and traditions of the engineering communities of practice. Moreover, engineering judgment is constituted as authoritative communication tasks that draw on the subject’s and audience’s common experiences and knowledge base for its clarity and persuasive power (e.g., Weedon (2019), "The role of rhetoric in engineering judgment," IEEE Trans. Prof. Commun. 62(2):165-177). The objective of this work short essay is to review the engineering education literature with the aim of synthesizing the concept of engineering judgment from theories of decision-making, identity, communities of practice, and discourse communities. Although the rationale for developing engineering judgment in undergraduate students is the complexity they will face in professional practice, engineering educators often considerably reduce the complexity of the problems students face (with learning engineering judgement or with engineering judgment in their undergraduate education?). Student work intended to train engineering judgment often prescribes goals and objectives, and demands a one-time decision, product, or solution that faculty or instructors evaluate. The evaluation process might not contain formal methods for foregrounding feedback from experience or reflecting on how the problem or decision emerges; thus, the loop from decision to upstream cognitive processes might not be closed. Consequently, in this paper, our exploration of engineering judgment is guided by the following questions: How have investigators researchers? defined engineering judgment? What are the potential limitations of existing definitions? How can existing definitions be expanded upon? What cognitive processes do students engage to make engineering judgments? How do communication tasks shape students’ engineering judgments? In what ways does engineer identity production shape students’ engineering judgments? How might a definition of engineering judgement suggest areas for improving undergraduate education? 

The engineering disciplines are rigorous in their application of scientific principles, and these principles are the ones most directly addressed in undergraduate engineering classrooms. However, engineers are also called to make decisions that implicitly account for complex criteria, including the welfare of those who use or are impacted by the systems engineers design and the economic needs of their employers. As a result, engineering is an art that requires practitioners to routinely navigate difficult tradeoffs that require professional judgments. These judgments include economic, ethical, social, and value-based dimensions. These dimensions can be conflicting, increasing the complexity of practice and foregrounding the prominence of judgment. And often, these judgements need to be explained to colleagues, managers, and clients through a range of written documents. Yet little work to date has investigated the relationship between the writing engineering students do and the development of engineering judgement, particularly in terms of how these facets intersect in students developing engineering identities . Therefore, the overall goal of this project is to elucidate the interactions between how students’ identification with the engineering profession impacts the way they convey engineering judgments to different audiences.