Understanding industry experiences: From problem solving to engineering students' learning gains

This paper reports the findings from surveying a diverse group of undergraduate engineering students (N~100) who participated in summer industry experiences. The goal was to capture and understand (a) the nature of industry experiences and (b) students' learning outcome gains (cognitive and affective) during these industry experiences. Ultimately, we aim to understand how students learn in real-world problem solving contexts in order to transfer such learning and such experiences into the engineering classroom. In undergraduate curriculum, well-structured problems with known solutions acquired through preferred solution methods are encountered more frequently than ill-structured problems. The linear process of problem solving teaches students a procedure to be memorized, practiced, and habituated, a process that emphasizes getting answers over making meaning. Real-world problem solving, though, commonly encountered in industry experiences suffused with complex and ill-structured problems, foster cognitive development of essential, problem-based, and globally competitive problem solving skills. Although industry experiences offer many benefits and enable engineering students to begin the practice of solving real-world complex problems, there is limited research on students' learning outcomes and skill gains as a result of participating in such experiences. Further, there is a lack of understanding of characteristics of the problems or projects that students work on. Our research serves to address these limitations.