Constructive Controversy in Engineering Undergraduate, Masters, Doctorate, and Professional Settings

Constructive Controversy has been incorporated as part of the preparation of participants in academic programs in engineering since the early 1980’s. It was introduced initially in undergraduate programs and more recently in Masters and Doctorate programs as well as Professional Masters programs and faculty professional development programs. The importance of developing constructive controversy skills for professionals is increasing given the rapidly increasing complexity of decisions and the paramount importance of innovation. We argue that constructive controversy is an excellent approach for operationalizing innovation as a social process. In this paper we document the approach through: 1) briefly reviewing the development of constructive controversy including the social interdependence theoretical framework and the details of this type of cooperative learning approach; 2) providing instructional guidelines, references and resources; and 3) reviewing current case examples in educational and professional development settings. Finally, a case study shows how constructive controversy has been implemented in a course on engineering grand challenges that adopts collaborative problem solving as its main pedagogy. Students worked in teams of four, with the assistance of their peer tutor, generated solutions to two wicked or illstructured problems related to the engineering challenges in one semester. Two teams need to work on their own solution initially and produce an integrated solution through the constructive controversy process at the end. The eight student teams were found to approach constructive controversy in three different styles, namely, “consensus and combination”, “confrontation and synthesis”, and “forcing and following”. Among them, “confrontation and synthesis” produced the best integrated solution and the highest self-reported gains in most of the learning outcomes whereas “consensus and combination” resulted in harmonious inter-team relationship and the highest self-perceived learning gains in collaborative problem solving. Lessons learned in this case would be the initiatives for the continuous improvement of the course.