Seminar Series |Leveraging Intuition Toward Engineering Solutions: A Framework Situating Intuition in Engineering Practice

Abstract

Engineers are tasked with designing, developing, and building solutions to complex problems. By nature, their decisions can have critical consequences. Avoiding engineering mistakes requires not only technical knowledge but also the ability to rapidly assess whether a solution is feasible and appropriate. Intuition (often referred to as a "gut feeling") is a defining characteristic of experts developed primarily through experience. Practicing engineers regularly rely on their intuition in navigating their roles, but justifying a decision based on intuition is viewed as unacceptable without data. This negative perception of intuition is an underlying reason for intuition being discouraged in the engineering classroom.
Our team has uncovered an engineering-specific definition for intuition as subconsciously leveraging experience to: 1) assess a present situation or 2) predict a future outcome. We frame this definition through an emergent Leveraging Intuition Toward Engineering Solutions (LITES) Framework. Findings from qualitative interviews with engineering professionals and quantitative assessments of engineering students’ use of intuition inform our definition and the LITES Framework with the intent to provide engineering educators with the insights to promote intuition in the classroom. Our work on defining intuition is supported by the National Science Foundation (EEC 1927149 and 1927250).

Biography

Elif Miskioğlu is Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Bucknell University. Trained as a chemical engineer, she holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering (with Genetics minor) from Iowa State University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University. Her early Ph.D. work focused on the development of bacterial biosensors capable of screening for disease vector specific pesticides. As a Howard Hughes Medical Institute MED-into-GRAD Fellow, her background also includes experience in infectious disease and epidemiology, exposing her firsthand to the broader context of engineering problems. These diverse experiences and a growing passion for improving engineering education prompted Dr. Miskioğlu to train to become an engineering education scholar through a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) grant in 2019. Her research area broadly encompasses expertise development and engineering practice and she is particularly interested in the construct of engineering intuition. Her work in engineering education has been supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NSF Research in the Formation of Engineers, and the Kern Family Foundation. As an educator, she is committed to challenging her students to uncover new perspectives and dig deeper into the context of the societal problems engineering is intended to solve. As a scholar, she seeks to contribute original theoretical research to the field and leverage her position as a chemical engineering educator to bridge the theory-to-practice gap in engineering education by championing empirically driven, and practice-informed, educational practices.