Work in progress: Theoretical approach to characterizing changes in students´ and engineers´ conceptual understanding and personal epistemologies

Successfully preparing students to become practicing engineers requires the development of their conceptual and epistemological approaches to the world around them. This paper describes a robust, flexible and empirically testable framework developed to characterize engineering students´ conceptual understanding and personal epistemologies as they develop from their sophomore year to their second year of engineering practice. The strength of the framework lies in the balances struck between firm commitments that can be confirmed or falsified, and open-endedness where existing theories are too contradictory to warrant such a commitment. The frameworks were developed through literature review drawing from the fields of cognitive science, educational psychology, science education, philosophy and learning theory.