Katja Plicht, Hendrik Härtig, Alexandra Vivien Dorschu

• Nowadays the expectations and requirements for engineers keep changing and involve besides technical, interdisciplinary and project management competencies, in particular problem solving skills (Lehmann et al., 2008). It has been shown that implicit teaching of problem solving strategies fails. The results are missing approaches, no linkage to the existing knowledge and the failure of a solution. (Woitkowski, 2018) However, there is a very well evaluated state of research how novices and experts solve physics problems. Experts use problem schemes, which include heuristics and exemplary problems that ease the process of generating proper solutions and make the process much less error-prone. (Friege, 2001) Therefore, the aim of this study is to develop a strategy training, which contains a strategy exercise and adjusted learning material to promote the problem solving competence of first year engineering students. To implement such a strategy training in the regular physics exercise, a manual concerning different task characteristics has been developed. The resulting categories have been used to create a compilation of tasks, which are suitable for analysing the fitting heuristics. To measure the effect of the new learning material and the strategy training a 2x2-design was chosen to examine the influence of either one of those variables. The pre-post-evaluation will focus on questionnaires considering the stages of the problem solving process.