Work in Progress: Designing a Chemical Reaction Engineering Course to Teach Problem Solving

This work-in-progress paper (WIP) describes the conception and implementation of a course in Chemical Kinetics and Reaction Engineering that has been specifically designed to teach students authentic problem-solving skills. Recent work has characterized how experts solve authentic engineering problems in terms of the decisions that the expert makes during the problem-solving process. From this framework and research on deliberate practice, we hypothesized that students can learn authentic engineering problem-solving if they are given the opportunity to practice making these expert decisions with timely feedback from their instructors. This framework of expert decision-making and deliberate practice informed the re-design of a chemical kinetics and reaction engineering course at a highly selective public research university. We chose this course because our previous research had shown that students were not learning any authentic problem-solving between the cornerstone and capstone design courses in chemical engineering; we thus sought to transform a core chemical engineering course to better teach these authentic problem-solving skills. In this WIP paper we provide a detailed description of the course design and implementation. We also provide preliminary measurements of students' authentic problem-solving skills before and after the course to determine how effective this particular design is for teaching authentic problem-solving. These preliminary findings can provide guidance to other chemical engineering instructors as to best practices for instructional design toward the goal of teaching authentic engineering problem-solving.