Scaffolding strategies in a rubric-based intervention to promote engineering students’ ability to address wicked problems
Journal article, 2019

In recent years, there has been increasing interest within the engineering education research community to prepare engineering students to address wicked problems (WPs) such as climate change, resource scarcity and violent conflict. Previous research suggests that engineering students are able to address WPs if they are given adequate support, but there is a lack of research on what kinds of support are needed. This paper aims to reduce this gap by reporting on students’ performance in, and approaches to, addressing WPs when different scaffolding strategies were used in different parts of a rubric-based intervention. The intervention aimed to provide undergraduate engineering students with an understanding of the nature of WPs and with a structured way of addressing them. For each part of the intervention, we discuss affordances for learning provided by the different scaffolding strategies. The results suggest that strong cognitive scaffolding can support students’ understanding of the nature of WPs and students’ performance in written responses to WPs, but possibly also limits deep engagement with WPs and transfer of learning to other contexts.

Author

Johanna Lönngren

Chalmers, Communication and Learning in Science, Engineering Education Research - EER (Chalmers)

Tom Adawi

Chalmers, Communication and Learning in Science, Engineering Education Research - EER (Chalmers)

Magdalena Svanström

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Environmental Systems Analysis

European Journal of Engineering Education

0304-3797 (ISSN) 1469-5898 (eISSN)

Vol. 44 1-2 196-221

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Subject Categories

Learning

Pedagogy

Learning and teaching

Pedagogical work

DOI

10.1080/03043797.2017.1404010

More information

Latest update

11/4/2019