On Hidden Shortcomings That Hinder Understanding: Thought-Provoking Observations from a Soft Skills Development Program for Engineering Students

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-823-8_5How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Engineering Education; Experiential Knowledge; Soft Skills; Physical Intuition; Digital Natives; Problem-Solving

Abstract

Due to technological advancements, changing expectations of engineers, and shifts in students’ attitudes and preparedness, the conditions of engineering education are constantly evolving. Those involved in higher education pedagogy often attribute the learning difficulties observed in engineering subjects exclusively to deficiencies in secondary school education, particularly in mathematics and the natural sciences. This study draws attention to the fact that this is only the easily observable level; behind the comprehension problems, a deeper erosion of knowledge is taking place, which is much harder to recognize, and standard testing methods are not suitable for this. This refers to the fading of experiential knowledge derived from the direct experience and interpretation of the physical world – knowledge that previous generations acquired naturally and unconsciously through childhood play, and later through physical activity and manual labor in their youth. We created a three-layered model to interpret the observations from the soft skills development program implemented at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Debrecen, and to serve as a framework for further research. This is a conceptual framework that distinguishes between the easily identifiable and readily assessable elements of formal school education – the second layer – and the hidden elements of experiential knowledge, which are difficult to detect and manifest indirectly, the foundational layer. Through the results of an experiment conducted with 382 first-year engineering students, we demonstrate that the difficulties in fundamental engineering problem-solving stem primarily not from a lack of defined academic knowledge, but from a lack of thinking related to real-world systems and processes, and a lack of fundamental physical and engineering intuition. In the experiment, first-year engineering students solved special tasks designed for this purpose through teamwork. The analysis is based on the submitted written work and observations of communication during the teamwork.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Boglárka Burján-Mosoni
AU  - Imre Kocsis
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/11/04
TI  - On Hidden Shortcomings That Hinder Understanding: Thought-Provoking Observations from a Soft Skills Development Program for Engineering Students
BT  - Proceedings of the Innovation in Engineering Education 2026 Conference (IEE 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 41
EP  - 53
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-823-8_5
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-823-8_5
ID  - Burján-Mosoni2026
ER  -