The Impact of Functional Modeling on Engineering Students' Mental Models

Abstract

Her research area is design cognition including systematic methods and tools for innovative design with a particular focus on concept generation and design-by-analogy. Her research seeks to understand designers' cognitive processes with the goal of creating better tools and approaches to enhance engineering design. She has authored over 100 technical publications including twenty-three journal papers, five book chapters, and she holds two patents.

Validation of a Mental Model Elicitation Instrument through Deployment of Control Groups in an Undergraduate Engineering Program

“…Taken as a whole, the results suggest that practice effects are not present when implementing the mental model instruments, which answers the original question that motivated the study. This helps to validate the instrument for future studies, as well as validate the authors' previously published work [1][2][3]5]. From a broad perspective, this project aims to understand the role of function in systems understanding, students' ability to communicate their knowledge about systems through mental model representations, and to find avenues for bringing technological literacy into both engineering and non-engineering classrooms.…”

“…The research presented in this paper fits into a larger frame of research on students' ability to understand systems. Recently, this research includes analogical reasoning [2,5] and the impact of functional modeling and decomposition training on systems representation [1,3], while historically, efforts were focused on methods for teaching function to undergraduate students [1,[31][32][33][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. The more recent inclusion of studies including graduate students [1] and nonengineering students (in progress) are helping the authors explore different ways to bring technology literacy into both engineering and non-engineering classrooms.…”

“…Measuring these different mental models poses a unique challenge since conceptualizations are held in the mind and any description of them is simply a representation of the mental model and not the mental model itself; in other words, we are seeing a reflection of the mental model through a dirty mirror. In this work, the previously published instruments used to elicit undergraduate students' mental models [1][2][3] are deployed without intervention to make progress on validation of the instruments for future research studies, therefore cleaning that metaphorical mirror. Despite the impossibility of perfectly representing a mental model, this work takes a step towards the development of a repeatable and reliable experimental instrument for use in academic research and engineering classrooms.…”

“…During the initial phases of the project, students in engineering design courses were given a series of experimental instruments or homework assignments to assess their ability to recognize product functionality, interpret and understand customer needs, and to explain or decompose a complex system. Students in prior studies had either previously learned functional modeling [3] or were taught functional modeling as an intervention between different mental model instrument implementations [1,2,5]. The investigators slowly adapted these instruments to assess students' systems thinking aptitude and have recently begun to investigate the relationship between mental models, recognition of function, and technology literacy and understanding.…”

“…This study is also informed by prior studies using the mental model instrument and accompanying scoring rubrics deployed in this study. Previous work implemented a functional modeling intervention between mental model data collections [1,2] where results showed improvement in mental model score after learning functional modeling. The functional modeling content delivered to students involved elements from the FAST method [34], flow-based method [35], and hierarchical method [36].…”