This study explored the use of heuristics in the design space by novice and expert engineers in the initial ideation of a design solution. Verbal protocol analyses were conducted with four engineering students and four professional engineers as they generated ideas to solve a design problem. Overall, both experts and novices used various types of…

This study focuses on the investigation of the effects of computer simulation and animation (CSA) on students' cognitive processes in an undergraduate engineering course. The revised Bloom's taxonomy, which consists of six categories in the cognitive process domain, was employed in this study. Five of the six categories were investigated,…

The authors investigated the differences in using problem decomposition and problem recomposition between dyads of engineering experts, engineering seniors, and engineering freshmen. Participants worked in dyads to complete an engineering design challenge within 1 hour. The entire design process was video and audio recorded. After the design…

This study introduces an innovative instructional method, called "pseudo peer diagram" (PPD), where students employ executive skills to compare and contrast their work with others' as a formative feedback mechanism. The focus of this study is how students compare and contrast their own diagrams with the pseudo peer diagrams as a stimulus…

Recent scholarship on secondary reading calls for a shift from teaching generic literacy strategies to teaching discipline-specific language and literacy practices (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008; Moje, 2008; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012). This call for disciplinary literacy instruction (DLI) reflects the growing recognition that literacy…

This exploratory study highlights certain differences in the way an expert and a novice engineer used their analyzing and generating skills while solving a fairly ill-structured design problem. The expert tends to use more inferences and elaboration when solving the design problem and the novice tend to use analysis that is focused on the…

In this study, the authors used two methods for analyzing expert data: verbal protocol analysis (VPA) and narrative analysis. VPA has been effectively used to describe the design processes employed by engineering students, expert designers, and expert-novice comparative research. VPA involves asking participants to "think aloud" while…

A comparative study was conducted to compare two approaches to engineering design curriculum between different schools (inter-school) and between two curricular approaches, "Project Lead the Way" (PLTW) and "Engineering Projects in Community Service" (EPIC High) (inter-curricular). The researchers collected curriculum…

The purpose of this study was to better understand cognitive strategies used by high school technology education students who have participated in technology education instruction with an engineering design focus. Specifically, this study evaluated the cognitive strategies of students participating in "Project Lead the Way" curriculum…