Exploring the effect of design education on the design cognition of sophomore engineering students

Abstract

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 task-independent 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 American Society for Engineering Education.