Is it Rocket Science or Brain Science? Developing an Approach to Measure Engineering Intuition

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.