Initial findings of high school pre-engineering and non-engineering students' design cognition

This paper presents the initial findings of a design cognition study involving two groups of high school juniors: those who have taken pre-engineering courses and those who have not. Equal numbers of dyad teams from both groups engaged in design-only sessions in which they generated solutions in response to the same design challenge. The design sessions were video and audio recorded. The recordings were transcribed and then segmented and coded using the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) ontologically-based design issues and design processes coding scheme. The students' design cognition was measured from the distributions of the design issues and design processes. Both the design issues and design processes were compared between the two high school student groups. Additionally, the results of the analyses were compared to baseline undergraduate engineering students. The results of this study did not reveal significant differences in either design issues or processes between the two high school student groups. However, when compared with the baseline undergraduate engineering students, there were significant differences between these groups with respect both to issues and processes and to the cognitive effort in their problem/solutions spaces.