Quantifying Differences Between Professional Expert Engineers and Engineering Students Designing: Empirical Foundations for Improved Engineering Education

Abstract

is the current director for the Center for Engineering Education Research (CEER) which examines innovative and effective engineering education practices as well as classroom technologies that advance learning and teaching in engineering. He is also working on National Science Foundation (NSF) funded projects exploring engineering design thinking. His areas of research include engineering design thinking, adult learning cognition, engineering education professional development and technical training. He has extensive international experience working on technical training and engineering educaton projects funded by the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, and U.S. Department of Labor, USAID. Countries where he has worked include Armenia,

Analysing Divergent-Convergent Activities in the Architectural Studio, With the Aid of the 'Knowledge Construction Activities' Model

“…In other cases, students may struggle to expand a concept to facilitate progress. Compared to professional designers, novices tend to produce more design issues, but organise them less effectively or in a lesser depth (Becker et al, 2018), showing the difficulty in treating decisions with divergent-convergent activities. Since divergentconvergent thinking modes require extensive decision making (Gabora, 2018), it is important to support students in practicing these activities so as to gain proficiency.…”

“…Noteworthy efforts have been made to study the cognitive processes and steps that take place during design activity, making it possible to analyse one's proficiency in applying certain activities. Extant methods have successfully identified evidence of divergent-convergent activities (Georgiev & Georgiev, 2018), critical decision-making and iterative cycles of divergent-convergent activities (Goldschmidt, 2016) and the distribution of design issues and their development (Becker et al, 2018). Meant to analyse the design process in terms of its micro-steps of change, these methods depict a design event through a continuous conversation cluster, or a part of one.…”

Board 33: Empirical Foundations for Improved Engineering Education: Differences Between Engineering Students and Professional Expert Engineers while Designing

“…This understanding is essential to identify appropriate learning experiences to reduce the performance gap between expert and novice designers. This paper presents updated and additional results to the 2018 ASEE paper on this project (Becker, Gero, et al, 2018).…”