Delayed Guidance: A Teaching-Learning Strategy to Develop Ill-Structured Problem Solving Skills in Engineering

Problem solving is an important skill for engineering graduates to develop. However, in most traditional engineering classrooms, students practice solving well structured problems which is not sufficient because engineers need to be able to solve real world problems which are ill structured. Therefore it is important for engineering students to be trained in ill-structured problem solving. In this paper, we present a new teaching-learning strategy for ill-structured problem solving based on productive failure and instructor prompts. Students do unguided in-class exploration of engineering problems in groups, after which they receive instruction on problem solving strategies. We conducted a pilot study by incorporating our teaching-learning strategy in a senior electrical engineering course. We found that students developed several ill-structured problem solving skills and showed a range of problem solving behaviors and heuristics.