Exploring student differences in formulating cross-disciplinary sustainability problems

Abstract

Every day engineers are confronted with complex grand challenges. Grand challenges related to natural disasters represent a class of complex problems that require working across multiple disciplines and involve not just solving the immediate problem but designing long-term sustainable systems. In this paper, we present exploratory work to characterize students' ability to formulate cross-disciplinary problems for a complex, contextualized, and cross-disciplinary disaster relief scenario. This includes a description of the study implemented in three global contexts, data collection, analysis, and results including a discussion of the utility of the scenario tool to distinguish group differences. The paper concludes with implications for research, instruction, and assessment.