Work in progress - aligning educational experiences with ways of knowing engineering: Understanding the engineering profession

Engineering practice in the United States is changing and education needs to match those changes. One strategy for improving engineering education is to utilize a better understanding of the engineering profession. By the completion of this three year NSF project in 2010, a more refined and updated picture of engineering practice will emerge. To investigate engineering practice, we will triangulate data from surveys, interviews and ethnographic observations. To date, pilot data has been collected from thirteen surveys and three interviews. By October 2008, it is expected that five hundred surveys, forty interviews, and studies of two engineering firms will be complete. Data collected so far indicates that engineers have a strong, core identification as analytic thinkers and problem solvers. It also indicates engineerspsila desire to express creativity and learn new things in their work. As this study will examine the epistemic frame of engineering-what makes an engineer, an engineer-the research group plans to have practicing engineers evaluate how well it succeeds in documenting what it means to be an engineer. Just as these practicing engineers provide feedback on this study, we hope our work will strengthen the ties between engineering practice and engineering education.