Work in progress — Studying design cognition to improve design education (original) (raw)
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Effects of design education on design cognition: A preliminary study of a sophomore design course
2011
Abstract This paper presents first year results of a longitudinal study of how engineering students develop design competencies over time, and how these competencies are affected by design education. Using a task-independent approach to verbal protocol analysis based on the function-behavior-structure ontology, the authors are able to evaluate students' cognitive processes as they work in pairs to respond to a design scenario.
Work in Progress-Studying Design Cognition to Improve Design Education
2010
Abstract-This paper presents results from the first phase of a longitudinal study of design cognition. The project examines how engineering students develop design competencies over time by applying a taskindependent approach to verbal protocol analysis based on the function-behavior-structure ontology. This analysis will be used to evaluate the effects of education on design cognition by following students in two curricula across three years (sophomore to senior).
WIP: Studying Design Cognition to Improve Design Education
2010
Abstract-This paper presents results from the first phase of a longitudinal study of design cognition. The project examines how engineering students develop design competencies over time by applying a taskindependent approach to verbal protocol analysis based on the function-behavior-structure ontology. This analysis will be used to evaluate the effects of education on design cognition by following students in two curricula across three years (sophomore to senior).
Exploring the Effect of Design Education on the Design Cognition of Sophomore Engineering Students
2020
In this paper, we report on progress of a three-year longitudinal study on the impact of design education on students' design thinking and practice. Using innovations in cognitive science and new methods of protocol analysis, we are working with engineering students to characterize their design cognition as they progress through engineering curricula. To observe potential effects of design education, students from two curricula at a large research-intensive state university are being studied. The control group is a major focused on engineering mechanics, which has a theoretical orientation that focuses on mathematical modeling based on first principles and has little formal design education prior to the capstone experience. The experimental group is a mechanical engineering major that uses design as a context for its curriculum. In order to provide a uniform basis for comparing students across projects and years, the authors use a taskindependent protocol analysis method grounded in the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) design ontology. This paper presents results from the first-year of the study, which included students at the beginning and the end of their sophomore year. Students in the experimental group completed an introductory mechanical design course, while students in the control group had no formal design component in their curriculum. We analyze and compare the percent occurrences of design issues and syntactic design processes from the protocol analysis of both cohorts. These results provide an opportunity to investigate and understand how sophomore students' design ability is affected by a design course.
2012
In this paper, we report on progress of a three-year longitudinal study on the impact of design education on students' design thinking and practice. Using innovations in cognitive science and new methods of protocol analysis, we are working with engineering students to characterize their design cognition as they progress through engineering curricula. To observe potential effects of design education, students from two curricula at a large research-intensive state university are being studied. The control group is a major focused on engineering mechanics, which has a theoretical orientation that focuses on mathematical modeling based on first principles and has little formal design education prior to the capstone experience. The experimental group is a mechanical engineering major that uses design as a context for its curriculum. In order to provide a uniform basis for comparing students across projects and years, the authors use a taskindependent protocol analysis method grounded in the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) design ontology. This paper presents results from the first-year of the study, which included students at the beginning and the end of their sophomore year. Students in the experimental group completed an introductory mechanical design course, while students in the control group had no formal design component in their curriculum. We analyze and compare the percent occurrences of design issues and syntactic design processes from the protocol analysis of both cohorts. These results provide an opportunity to investigate and understand how sophomore students' design ability is affected by a design course.
2011 Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2011
This paper presents the results of design cognition studies of two groups of students: high school juniors and seniors who have taken pre-engineering courses and sophomore university students in a mechanical engineering department. Both groups carried out design sessions designing for the same design challenge. Data were collected using the protocol analysis technique through video and audio recordings of design sessions. The students' design cognition was measured by segmenting and coding the transcribed videos using the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) ontologically-based design issues and design processes coding scheme that provides a uniform basis for analyzing design protocols. Differences in design cognition were found and tentative explanations provided to account for them.
Journal of Technology Education, 2016
Reported in this article are initial results from of a longitudinal study to characterize the design cognition and cognitive design styles of high school students with and without pre-engineering course experience over a 2-year period, and to compare them with undergraduate engineering students. The research followed a verbal protocol analysis based on the functionbehavior-structure (FBS) ontology, which employs a task-independent approach that is distinct from a task-based or an ad hoc approach. This approach to protocol analysis is applicable across any process-based view of designing and generates results based on a common comparative measure independent of the design task. In this article, Year 1 results are presented comparing only students in their junior year of high school who had formal pre-engineering course experience (experiment group) with those who did not have formal pre-engineering course experience (control group). Specifically, data collected from design sessions were analyzed for comparison of design issues and processes between experiment and control groups, respectively. Results from analysis of Year 1 data did not reveal any significant differences between the experiment and control groups in engineering design cognition. Based on these results, one would conclude that students with pre-engineering course experience do not demonstrate a stronger focus on the process of producing design solutions than do students without such experience. Although analysis of demographic data from high school participants indicates some degree of common prior preengineering experiences, it did not provide a sufficient explanation for why no significant differences in engineering design thinking were found between these groups. The researchers anticipate that Year 2 data will indicate that as the preengineering students continue engaging in formal engineering design experiences during their final year of high school, some degree of difference in design cognition will be demonstrated.
Exploring the Effects of the Design Prompt on Students’ Design Cognition
Volume 1: 15th International Conference on Advanced Vehicle Technologies; 10th International Conference on Design Education; 7th International Conference on Micro- and Nanosystems, 2013
Engineering design educators often provide their students a task (or "prompt") to guide their design projects. Similarly, engineering design educational researchers also provide research participants with a design task to guide their activity during experimental sessions. In both contexts, there is a fundamental underlying assumption that the design task has no significant effect on the students'/participants' design cognition. Specifically, the authors test the hypothesis that a design task does affect a student's design experience. Failing to disprove this hypothesis could significantly impact both design education practice and design education experimental research. To determine the effect of a design task on students' design cognition, experimental sessions were conducted wherein student design teams worked together to solve a speculative design task. The student teams were presented with two nearly identical design tasks; however, one featured an additional design requirement. A task-independent protocol analysis method grounded in the Function-Behavior-Structure design ontology is performed on audio and video recordings of the design sessions to provide a common basis for comparing the two groups. Differences in design cognition are identified by analyzing and comparing the percent occurrences of the design issues and design processes and the Problem-Solution indices. 1 THE ROLE OF THE DESIGN PROMPT 1.1. Design Prompts in Design Education At the beginning of each course offering, design instructors are faced with the challenge of creating a meaningful, appropriate, and valuable project experience for their students. These project-based learning experiences (PjBL) provide