Thinking styles and engineering: Proposals for strengthening the professional training of engineers through physics courses

Abstract

One way to contribute to the strengthening of professional training processes in Engineering is through teaching and evaluation methods physics courses that promote those thinking styles that should be preferred by an engineer to solve tasks of their profession. Based on the above, the objective of this research was to identify those thinking styles that ideally a graduate of industrial civil engineering from a certain Chilean university should prefer to perform their profession tasks. Responding to this objective, it will be possible to generate educational proposals in physics courses for that career. For this, a qualitative methodology called thematic analysis was used. The data sources were semi-structured interviews with academics with enough experience in the career, besides the analysis of the institutional graduation profile. From a deductive perspective, according to the thinking styles, the ideal preferences for the egislative, judicial, global, hierarchical, liberal and external styles emerged as a result. Finally, a discussion was held on some teaching and evaluation methods that can be carried out in the physics courses of this career in order to promote these thinking styles.