Background As engineers solve problems that are ill‐structured and require collaboration, a common goal of engineering programs is to develop students' competencies for solving such problems in teams, often using cornerstone design experiences. Purpose With the goal of designing effective learning environments, this study identifies qualitatively different ways that engineering students experienced ill‐structured problems while working in teams. Design/Method This phenomenographic study employs interview data from 27 first‐year engineering students. Iterative data analysis resulted in categories of student experiences and their logical relationships. Results Seven categories describing collaborative, ill‐structured problem‐solving experiences emerged: completion, transition, iteration, organization, collaboration, reasoning, and growth. These categories are organized in an outcome space along dimensions we call reaction to ambiguity and use of multiple perspectives that can be used to frame students' perspectives from less comprehensive to more comprehensive. Conclusions First‐year engineering students experience team‐based, ill‐structured problem solving in a variety of ways. The resulting outcome space is of practical use to educators who teach courses involving collaborative, ill‐structured problem solving.

Engineering design decisions have non-trivial implications, and empathic approaches are one way that engineers can understand and translate the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. Prior literature demonstrates that students must develop empathic skills and beliefs that these skills are important to embody empathic approaches in meaningful ways. However, we have limited understanding of the relationship between students' beliefs about the value of empathy in engineering decision making and how they describe their reported use of empathic approaches. We collected qualitative data through interviews with ten undergraduate engineering students in capstone design. We found that our participants espoused a belief that empathic approaches are valuable in engineering design decisions. However, while students considered diverse perspectives when describing how they made design decisions, their reported behaviour during design decisions did not demonstrate translation of their empathic understanding. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to educators and researchers.

Background: Engineers need to be able to make robust design decisions. Because design is an ill-structured endeavor, design decisions require some combination of rationalistic, intuitive, and empathic approaches. However, engineering education remains largely oriented towards the use of rationalistic approaches. Purpose/Hypothesis: We posit that the persistent gap between the need to leverage diverse approaches to make engineering design decisions and the emphasis on primarily rationalistic approaches in engineering spaces is due, in part, to the beliefs that individuals hold about diverse approaches. Design/Method: We analyzed interview transcripts to identify the beliefs shared by students and by faculty (as individual units of analysis) about rationalistic, intuitive, and empathic approaches to making engineering design decisions, and then we compared the shared beliefs of the two groups. Results: Students and faculty similarly shared a belief that rationalistic approaches are normative in engineering. The two groups also had a common, general belief that empathic approaches are missing in engineering, but they differed in the ways in which they talked about empathic approaches. Finally, the two groups differed in their beliefs about the role of diverse approaches in practice: students believed rationalistic approaches are and should be used most in practice, but faculty believed that rationalistic approaches are inherently limited and therefore require the use of intuitive approaches. Conclusions: We interpret the pervasive belief that engineers are expected to portray their design decision making as primarily rational as a reflection of an unrealistic yet powerful social norm in engineering spaces, which can be understood as a key part of how the exclusive culture of engineering is perpetuated. We see a need to teach explicitly about this social norm in order to disrupt it, and we encourage engineering educators to reflect on how the ways in which their praxis might endorse or reinforce such unrealistic beliefs, either explicitly or implicitly.

Emily Dringenberg is a PhD Candidate in Engineering Education at Purdue University. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (Kansas State '08) and a Master of Science in Industrial Engineering (Purdue '14). Her current dissertation research focuses on using qualitative methods to explore the experiences of students engaging with engineering design problems. Additionally, her research interests include transfer of learning, personal epistemology, and design learning.John Alexander Mendoza-Garcia, Purdue University, West Lafayette / Pontificia Universidad Javeriana -Bogota, ColombiaJohn Mendoza-Garcia is a Colombian Systems Engineer (Bachelor's and Master's degree) that currently is a Ph.D candidate in Engineering Education at Purdue University. His advisors are Dr. Monica E. Cardella and Dr. William C. Oakes. He is interested in understanding the development of systems thinking to support its assessment and teaching. Currently, he works for the first year engineering program at Purdue where he has taught the engineering introductory courses in design and algorithmic thinking, and has also developed content for these courses. He has an appointment with the department of systems engineering at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia since 2005 and is currently on a leave of absence. There he taught systems thinking and coordinated the professional internships, the social internships and the graduation project. He worked as Software Engineer in different companies for seven years before transitioning to academia. Reflections on each of these considerations are summarized and provided in full. Our analysis of the reflections revealed that the application of the phenomenographic methodology must respond to nuances in individual contexts. Thus, the primary contribution of this paper is the identification of five key considerations that can help guide a phenomenographic research approach, and transparency of how five emerging phenomenographic researchers have dealt with these considerations.

Background: Modern engineering culture is rooted in assumptions of intellectual superiority. Scholars have demonstrated that smartness functions as an oppressive cultural practice in educational settings. However, the shared ways in which undergraduate engineering students understand what it means to be smart remain largely implicit and unexamined.Purpose/Hypothesis: We investigated the beliefs held by students about what it means to be smart and the role of smartness in their undergraduate education. Design/Method: We conducted one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with 20 students at a predominately White institution. Our team utilized open, descriptive coding to iteratively condense our data into categories, codes, and subcodes, followed by analysis to identify and characterize the participants' commonly held beliefs. Results: Students believed that being smart is working efficiently or maximizing outcomes while minimizing effort. Determining smartness as efficiency included social comparison and assumptions about effort, which introduced ambiguity into students' judgments of smartness. The resulting social hierarchy (relative positioning as smart) was commonly believed to enable or restrict access to necessary resources.Conclusions: Students' belief that smartness is an individual capacity to work more efficiently than others obfuscates the reality of smartness as a cultural practice that is baked into our systems and perpetuates inequity. Without action to reveal and disrupt smartness as a structural and oppressive practice, the status quo of inequitable participation in engineering will persist.