Model-Eliciting Activities: Assessing Engineering Student Problem Solving and Skill Integration Processes*

A Model-Eliciting Activity (MEA) presents student teams with a thought-revealing, modeleliciting, open-ended, realistic, client-driven problem for resolution. Here we extend the original MEA construct developed by mathematics education researchers to upper-level engineering coursework and introduce an ethical component. Our extensions also require students to integrate previously learned concepts as they gain new understanding. We propose that MEAs offer engineering educators at least two potential benefits: improved conceptual understanding and a means for assessing the problem solving process. However, these benefits will only accrue if the MEAs are properly implemented. Consequently, relative to the first we propose certain strategies, learned through experience, for successful MEA implementation, recognizing that this is not a simple task. In addition, we suggest using MEAs as assessment tools and illustrate how they can help analyze students’ problem solving processes. Our findings are based on experiments conducted in different learning environments over a two year period at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering. This paper should serve as a resource for those engineering educators and researchers interested in implementing MEAs.