Leveraging Uncertainty: A Framework for Argumentation in Socioscientific Ill-Structured Problem Solving

As the nature of work significantly transforms over the next several decades, engineering students today will play a major role in building and developing society. Both industry and academia position critical thinking skills and problem-solving abilities as central to the growing needs of developed and developing societies. Consequently, engineers will be paid in the future to solve complex problems. ABET (2021) standards indicate these ill-structured problems or complex engineering problems involve multiple factors outside of standard building codes or equations. Complex or socioscientific problems have no obvious solution pathway, multiple perspectives, and require a well-reasoned and argued solution. Thus, ill-structured problems emerge from situated and societal contexts in which various aspects of the context or problem space are undefined, unspecified, uncertain, or as Chen et al. (2019) describe, 'fuzzy'. Novice learners struggle with the inherent uncertainty embedded at all stages of the problem-solving process. Students need opportunities to grapple with the challenges of real-world problems, including the inherent uncertainties associated with them. In problem-solving situations learners often reject or avoid uncertainty and associated feelings of discomfort because traditional education provides few opportunities to confront these uncertainties in problem solving. Evidence suggests uncertainty becomes a productive or constructive experience when learners are forced to express, contend, grapple with, argue, and negotiate how and what they know with others. Thus, generation of uncertainty, or productive uncertainty, in problem-solving situations facilitates management of ambiguity and complexity through argumentation to, in turn, foster well-informed, confidently argued and supported solutions. The purpose of this study was to develop a framework to guide designers/instructors to facilitate learning using argumentation as a pedagogical tool to manage uncertainty.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Curriculum and Instruction

Department dc:contributor.department

Education, Vocational-Technical

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Clark, Rebecca Michelle

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Lockee, Barbara B.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Cennamo, Katherine S.
• Johnson, Alicia Leinaala
• Potter, Kenneth R.

• argumentation
• uncertainty
• complex problems
• ill-structured problems
• socioscientific issues

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:36746

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/114856