Cognitive Investigations into Knowledge Representation in Engineering Design (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cognitive Science, 2006
As engineers gain experience and become experts in their domain, the structure and content of their knowledge changes. Two studies are presented that examine differences in knowledge representation among freshman and senior engineering students. The first study examines recall of mechanical devices and chunking of components, and the second examines whether seniors represent devices in a more abstract functional manner than do freshmen. The most prominent differences between these 2 groups involve their representation of the functioning of groups of electromechanical components and how these groups of components interact to produce device behavior. Seniors are better able to construct coherent representations of devices by focusing on the function of sets of components in the device. The findings from these studies highlight some ways in which the structure and content of mental representations of design knowledge differ during the early stages of expertise acquisition.
Experts vs. Novices: Differences in How Mental Representations are Used in Engineering Design
Journal of Technology Education, 2011
Mental representation is an important cognitive construct when solving engineering design problems. When students are given a design problem, they must decide what is known, the constraints they have to work with, and what is required by the customer. They then use mental representations, such as metaphors, analogies, and propositions, to make sense of the problem and develop a solution. Several studies have investigated the use of mental representations in problem solving. For example, Greca and Moreira (1997) investigated the use of mental models, propositions, and images by college students in solving physics problems involving electrical and magnetic fields. Their findings suggested that students work mostly with propositions unrelated to, or interpreted according to, mental models. Gick and Holyoak (1980) investigated the provision of source analogs prior to the tackling of a problem that is superficially different, but conceptually similar. Casakin and Goldschmidt (1999) examined the use of visual analogs by expert and novice designers in their work. The results of both studies indicated that people are good at utilizing prior problem and solution information when they are directed to do so, but then may not be efficient in detecting analogous information under unprompted conditions. Other studies (Holyoak & Koh, 1987; Keane, 1987) show that past analogies are more readily activated when there are surface similarities in the target problem and the analogy. Conceptual Framework Guiding the Study There are several types of mental representation, but for the purpose of this study propositions, metaphors, and analogies were investigated. A proposition refers to the smallest unit of knowledge that one can sensibly judge as true or false. According to Paivio (1990), propositions are the most versatile of representational concepts because they can be used to describe any type of information. They are strings of symbols that correspond to natural language. Unlike language, however, propositional representations are assumed to be "completely amodal, abstract, conceptual structures that represent information in the same way regardless of whether the information is experienced verbally, as a spoken or written sentence in whatever language, or nonverbally, as a perceptual scene" (Paivio, 1990, p. 31). The relevance of propositions for engineering
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.
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.
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.
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.
A study on the representation of examples in learning engineering concepts
Proceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference, 2012
The use of examples in engineering curricula is a commonly used means to teach engineering students new concepts and ideas; these examples play an important role in teaching engineering students how to become technically competent engineers and designers. Being able to learn from examples and avoid fixation to those examples is an important task in that process. Design fixation is a major constraint in design thinking as it constrains the solution space where designers search for their ideas. The experiments described in this paper aim to investigate how students fixate to different types of representations given to them. A pilot study comparing sketched and physical representations of examples show that students are less likely to fixate to the design specifications of examples provided in the form of physical model, this suggests that they are able to better understand the design limitations of examples presented in the form of a physical model. A second experiment is described which will explore this trend further and will compare how students fixate on and derive information between sketched and computer-aided design representations.
Patterns of student conceptual understanding across engineering content areas
International Journal of Engineering Education, 2015
Much of the existing research on engineering students’ conceptual understanding focuses on identifying difficult concepts in specificcourses and curricula. Although there are a great number of findings from which engineering educators may be able to draw, feware directly transferable from their original context and few inform instructors about how to improve learning. This paper seeks tofill the gap by investigating conceptual understanding across four engineering disciplines. Specifically, the present study seeks toanswer the following overarching research question: What are the patterns in engineering students’ conceptual understanding acrossfour engineering content areas? We used an amplified secondary qualitative data analysis to examine over 250 interviews withengineering students that were initially conducted to understand students’ conceptual understanding in different disciplines ofengineering. The engineering topics represented in the data set included mechanics of material...
Learning Conceptual Knowledge in the Engineering Sciences: Overview and Future Research Directions
Journal of Engineering Education, 2008
Learning conceptual knowledge in engineering science is a critical element in the development of competence and expertise in engineering. To date, however, research on conceptual learning in engineering science has been limited. Therefore, this article draws heavily on fundamental research by cognitive psychologists and applied research by science educators to provide a background on fundamental issues in the field and methods for assessing conceptual knowledge. Some of the most common conceptual difficulties from three domains: mechanics, thermal science and direct current electricity, are discussed to provide concrete examples of what students find difficult to learn. The article concludes with a discussion of possible sources of these difficulties, implications for instruction, and suggestions for future research.