As the nature of work significantly transforms over the next several decades, engineering students today will play a major role in building and developing society. Both industry and academia position critical thinking skills and problem-solving abilities as central to the growing needs of developed and developing societies. Consequently, engineers will be paid in the future to solve complex problems. ABET (2021) standards indicate these ill-structured problems or complex engineering problems involve multiple factors outside of standard building codes or equations. Complex or socioscientific problems have no obvious solution pathway, multiple perspectives, and require a well-reasoned and argued solution. Thus, ill-structured problems emerge from situated and societal contexts in which various aspects of the context or problem space are undefined, unspecified, uncertain, or as Chen et al. (2019) describe, 'fuzzy'. Novice learners struggle with the inherent uncertainty embedded at all stages of the problem-solving process. Students need opportunities to grapple with the challenges of real-world problems, including the inherent uncertainties associated with them. In problem-solving situations learners often reject or avoid uncertainty and associated feelings of discomfort because traditional education provides few opportunities to confront these uncertainties in problem solving. Evidence suggests uncertainty becomes a productive or constructive experience when learners are forced to express, contend, grapple with, argue, and negotiate how and what they know with others. Thus, generation of uncertainty, or productive uncertainty, in problem-solving situations facilitates management of ambiguity and complexity through argumentation to, in turn, foster well-informed, confidently argued and supported solutions. The purpose of this study was to develop a framework to guide designers/instructors to facilitate learning using argumentation as a pedagogical tool to manage uncertainty. / Doctor of Philosophy / Work is changing across industries, and students today will play a major role in building the world of tomorrow by solving complex problems. Therefore, industry and education position critical thinking and problem-solving skills as crucial to developing an innovative workforce to prosper in the future. Moreso, engineers will play a major role in using critical thinking and problem-solving skills to solve complex problems. Essentially, engineers will be paid to solve these pressing problems. Complex problems, also known as socioscientific problems, are extremely uncertain - having no apparent solution, requiring multiple perspectives, and arriving at a feasible solution under constraints. Additionally, complex problems are impacted by multiple effects associated with cultural and social contexts, making these problems increasingly more 'fuzzy' or uncertain. Because uncertainty is a key part of complex problem solving, students need chances to grapple with these problems and unavoidable uncertainty, which is too often avoided. Uncertainty creates feelings of discomfort which learners seek to avoid or reduce. However, evidence indicates uncertainty can also be used productively. If students can embrace or learn to work within uncertainty, they can learn to argue, negotiate, reason, and solve problems more effectively. The act of collaboratively arguing, reasoning, sharing perspective, or negotiating (argumentation as a process) holds promise as an overarching practice which allows students to confront and manage uncertainty in problem solving. Therefore, this study aimed to position argumentation as a teaching tool to foster and manage productive moments of uncertainty while solving complex problems. The study resulted in a taxonomy of uncertainty sources and management strategies, and cognitive guidelines for designers and educators to use argumentation as a process to promote and manage uncertainty while learning to solve complex problems.

Ill-structured problems, problems that do not have simple structures and one finite correct solution, are the most common form of problems that engineers meet in everyday situations. However, because ill-structured problems and well-structured problems differ in many aspects, the curriculum of engineering education mostly focuses on well-structured problems, leading to the possibility that students might not apply the knowledge they have learned from school to the workplace after they graduate. Problem-based learning using ill-structured problems is more effective in teaching students to approach a solution for a task in a more expert-like way, by, for example, using analogical reasoning. In this study, novice participants who are majoring in Engineering and expert participants who are in the Civil or Mechanical Engineering fields are asked to solve ill-structured problems. The focus of analysis will be on the different types of analogies they use. Self-Efficacy will also be measured using a survey to observe if different levels of self-efficacy affect problem solving differently in the two groups, and if there is any relationship between types of analogies that each groups use and self-efficacy. The findings of this study would help to improve the curriculum of engineering education especially enhancing students’ cognitive strategy for engineering designs. / text

Institutions of higher education often promise to graduate individuals capable not only of excelling in their area of expertise but also qualified as exceptional leaders and citizens. Yet, what are the competencies needed from leaders in order to address the most challenging issues facing society? How would higher education cultivate the next generation of leaders for a world of problems we currently cannot solve, and how would it be determined if some graduates were 'more prepared' than others to face these challenges? This dissertation seeks to answer these questions through the work of two distinct manuscripts. The first argues that human processes for meaning-making play critical formative roles in the setting and solving of our most complex problems. In essence, that problem-solving can be considered as embodied acts of meaning-making. This link is made through analysis of Bruner's concept of narrative and highlights the importance played by naming and framing through one's unique perspective while attempting to interpret an ill-structured problem. The second manuscript develops a tool to measure 'systems thinking,' a competency that describes the sort of cognitive flexibility that might be beneficial for graduates to be emerging leaders capable of addressing critical societal issues. A framework for considering systems thinking competency is presented and used as the foundation of a scenario-based assessment tool. Results from a qualitative pilot study are shown as part of introducing the tool with primary findings: (a) the tool elicited meaningful data on each of the constructs for which it was designed; (b) emergent within each construct were possible means of characterizing the data that will allow for future study of variation across respondents. / Ph. D.

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