Cognitive Investigations into Knowledge Representation in Engineering Design

Abstract

As engineering students 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 uses a recall paradigm, and the second uses Latent Semantic Analysis to analyze brief descriptions written by engineering students. Both studies find that the most prominent differences between these two groups of students are their representations of the function of electromechanical components and how these components interact. The findings from these studies highlight some ways in which the structure and content of mental representations of design knowledge differ with experience.