CAREER: It's Not Sorcery, It's Skill: Shedding Light on How Professional and Personal Experiences Shape the Use of Intuition in Engineering Practice

About This Grant

Expert engineering practitioners frequently rely on their intuition – the ability to subconsciously use their past experiences to navigate a present problem. Practitioners report intuition to be a crucial problem-solving skill that they are also hesitant to admit having used because of stigma associated with the term. Alternative terms like “gut feeling,” “spidey-sense,” or even “black magic sorcery” are often used instead. This avoidance around discussing intuition use denies a reality of engineering practice and may also explain why engineering intuition remains understudied. Limited previous work has identified that intuition is primarily developed through past experiences. It is yet unknown how personal and professional experiences influence intuition development and how positive or negative feedback loops created by experience influence intuition use. All that can be deduced is that intuition’s reliance on experience inherently means that the ability to develop this critical problem-solving skill is opportunity-limited, and the value of certain experiences in engineering is reinforced throughout hiring processes that favor students with internship, research, and leadership experiences. The overarching goal of this CAREER project is to support the creation of the 21st century engineer (aligning with the goals of Engineering Education and Centers Division). This work will shed light on the experience-intuition-expertise relationship in engineering to further our understanding and to take steps towards creating space for open discussion of intuition use in engineering. The knowledge generated will support the creation of curricular interventions that explicitly embed experience-based skills development and serve as a step towards alleviating the opportunity bottleneck surrounding intuition development. Generated knowledge will also expand our understanding of what experiences add value in developing transferable engineering problem-solving skills. These insights will subsequently support the hiring and recruitment practices that allow for consideration of qualified candidates with non-traditional experiences, which will reduce the barriers to entry, persistence, and re-entry into engineering careers. This CAREER project will employ a qualitative approach across two Aims. Aim 1 intends to characterize the ways in which engineering practitioners understand experience to influence intuition development and use. A phenomenographic approach (that is, one which explores the ways in which people experience or think about phenomena) will be used to address RQ1: How do practitioners understand the role of experience in their development of engineering problem-solving skills, particularly the skill of engineering intuition? This step will be followed by narrative analysis addressing RQ2: How do personally formative experiences facilitate or inhibit an individual’s perceived agency in using intuition as a problem-solving approach?, and RQ3: How do aspects of identity and self-perception interplay with experience to affect an individual’s development and use of intuition? Outcomes will directly inform the first component of the project’s Education Plan to develop and pilot a student-facing Practitioner Voices Series that uses practitioner narratives to highlight different experiential pathways. Aim 2 intends to characterize the perceptions of intuition and its role in engineering practice held by engineering faculty and industry recruiters. A phenomenographic approach will also be used to answer RQ4: How do engineering faculty and industry recruiters understand engineering problem solving, particularly the role of intuition? This step will be followed by discourse analysis used to answer RQ5: What does the discourse around intuition across different groups reveal about sociocultural influences on the construct and the potential challenges of any intuition-related initiatives? Outcomes will provide insight into the target audiences for the second component of the project’s Education Plan to develop and pilot materials, including short courses, that introduce intuition to engineering faculty, practitioners, and industry recruiters. These efforts have the potential to revolutionize engineering by facilitating a more diverse workforce poised to more efficiently and accurately leverage their past experiences to address current and arising world problems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.