The diagnosis of plant failure: A comparison of student and professional engineers

A problem of plant failure was presented individually to (a) experienced professionals, and (b) senior engineering students in the University of Melbourne. Each participant in the experiment was asked to assess the problem and try to solve it, his verbal response to this request being tape-recorded; written replies from other students who had answered the problem as an examination question were also available. All responses were analyzed in terms of the strategies and tactics adopted by the engineers and the intellectual style displayed in their attempts to solve the problem. The results showed that the older professionals were more fluent, better able to sidestep dead ends in their thinking, somewhat more disciplined in avoiding early commitment to particular hypotheses, better able to make use of negative information, more likely to refer to past experience, more suspicious of the information provided, and somewhat more likely to identify a key issue which was not immediately obvious.