Effects of design education on design cognition: A preliminary study of a sophomore design course

This paper presents first year results of a longitudinal study of how engineering students develop design competencies over time, and how these competencies are affected by design education. Using a task-independent approach to verbal protocol analysis based on the function-behavior-structure ontology, the authors are able to evaluate students´ cognitive processes as they work in pairs to respond to a design scenario. In this paper, the authors analyze data from experiments that occurred before and after the participants completed a sophomore-level design course. The percent occurrences of design issues and syntactic design processes from the first and second halves of each of the two experimental design sessions are analyzed and compared in order to identify differences in students´ design behaviors. These results provide an opportunity to investigate and understand how sophomore students´ design ability is affected by a design course.