Measuring Student's Confidence With Problem Solving In The Engineering Design Classroom

The study presented in this paper focuses on the confidence component of problem solving in the undergraduate engineering design classroom. The Problem Solving Inventory was given to students participating in NAU’s Design4Practice sequence of multi-disciplinary design courses. Two semesters of data were collected and analyzed. Year-in-school data compared closely to published trends. Differences in confidence were identified for students that had or hadn’t declared a major within engineering. Of particular interest was the occurrence of team differences in confidence, influenced to some extent, by instructor style.