Work in progress — Studying design cognition to improve design education

This paper presents results from the first phase of a longitudinal study of design cognition. The project examines how engineering students develop design competencies over time by applying a task-independent approach to verbal protocol analysis based on the function-behavior-structure ontology. This analysis will be used to evaluate the effects of education on design cognition by following students in two curricula across three years (sophomore to senior). A large study pool from both programs completed spatial reasoning tests to determine overall population characteristics. A subset of this pool is now participating in verbal protocol studies in which students work in pairs to respond to a design scenario. This paper reports results of the spatial reasoning tests as well as preliminary results from the first set of protocol studies.