The design process is full of judgment, especially around successes and failures that occur through each iteration. Decisions about how to proceed when ideas do not work can be especially challenging for beginning designers. Yet, experts are able to demonstrate more natural regulation of the process. This research focused on the experiences of…

Digital education has recently become a mainstream education model. Despite digital education's increasing popularity, there remain issues when it comes to teacher-student interactions in digital space, which have made it impossible for this model to achieve the same teaching quality as traditional in-person education. Compared with other academic…

Design thinking holds the key to innovation processes, but is often difficult to detect because of its implicit nature. We undertook a study of novice designers engaged in team-based design exercises in order to explore the correlation between design thinking and designers' physical (observable) behavior and to identify new, objective, design…

Design within primary and secondary schools has been increasingly emphasized over the past decade. As a response to this increased interest, qualitative research examining students' cognitive processes involved in the practices of design has been on the rise. These studies have commonly employed the concurrent think-aloud research methodology to…

Design is a key element of both the teaching and learning of engineering and technology. However, the process of engineering design has yielded limited research results. This study explored the iterative design process by searching for sequential design thinking patterns. The researchers collected nine concurrent think-aloud protocols from…

In the context of a 10-day summer camp makerspace experience that employed design-based learning (DBL) strategies, the purpose of this descriptive case study was to better understand the ways in which children use visualization skills to negotiate design as they move back and forth between the world of nondigital design techniques (i.e., drawing,…

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…

The objective of this research was to explore the relationship between information access and design solution quality of high school students presented with an engineering design problem. This objective is encompassed in the research question driving this inquiry: How does information access impact the design process? This question has emerged in…

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…

Working on an open-ended task such as designing an engineering artifact is a rich learning experience for students, although they generally receive little direct guidance and instruction from their professors. In order to be successful on such a task, students need to set reasonable goals for themselves and adopt intrinsic standards for success so…