The increasing complexity and sophistication of the construction environment, the use of new materials and technologies, and greater performance expectations by clients results in new challenges and opportunities for construction engineers.
Therefore it is important to provide students with problem solving skills needed for successful decision making.
Problem solving learning is used for expanding the curriculum to include critical cognitive skills and a problem-solving experience in civil engineering.
It is very important to understand how students perform a task and solve problems, in addition to the skills required to perform the task.
The key to developing scientific and engineering thinking in students is to create a rich, problem-based learning environment, where students need to apply the same cognitive process used by scientists (or engineers) in inquiry based tasks.
Incorporating metacognition into the classroom can help students to better define the problems and to structure the problem solving process.