In this paper we report on an in-depth study of engineering design processes. Specifically, we extend our previous research on engineering student design processes to compare the design behavior of students and expert engineers. Nineteen experts from a variety of engineering disciplines and industries each designed a playground in a lab setting, and gave verbal reports of their thoughts during the design task. Measures of their design processes and solution quality were compared to pre-existing data from 26 freshmen and 24 seniors. The experts spent significantly more time on the task overall and in each stage of engineering design, including significantly more time problem scoping. The experts also gathered significantly more information covering more categories. Results support the argument that problem scoping and information gathering are major differences between advanced engineers and students, and important competencies for engineering students to develop. Timeline representations of the expert designers' processes illustrate characteristic distinctions we found and may help students gain insights into their own design processes.
How is historical knowledge transmitted across generations? What is the role of schooling in that transmission? The authors address these questions by reporting on a thirty-month longitudinal study into how home, school, and larger society served as contexts for the development of historical consciousness among adolescents. Fifteen families drawn from three different school communities participated. By adopting an intergenerational approach, the authors sought to understand how the defining moments of one generation—its “lived history”—becomes the “available history” to the next. In this article, the authors focus on what parents and children shared about one of the most formative historical events in parents’ lives: the Vietnam War. Drawing on notions of collective memory, as articulated by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the authors sought to understand which stories, archived in historical memory and available to the disciplinary community, are remembered and used by those beyond its borders. In contrast, which stories are no longer widely shared, eclipsed by time’s passage and unable to cross the bridge separating generation from generation? The authors conclude by discussing the forces that act to historicize today’s youth and suggest how educators might marshal these forces—rather than spurning or simply ignoring them—to advance young people’s historical understanding.
Published models of the engineering design process are widely available and often illustrated for students with a block diagram showing design as sequential and iterative. Here we examine experts' conceptions of the design process in relation to a model synthesized from several introductory engineering textbooks. How do experts' conceptions compare? What might they see as alternative accounts? We present preliminary results from an investigation of practicing engineers (n=19) who were asked to think aloud while reading a description of this "textbook" model, as well as draw their idea of the engineering design process and choose descriptors of design. Only 3 participants were found to have a view in major disagreement with the model, yet 7 drew alternative types of diagrams, and the experts as a whole emphasized problem scoping and communication. We focus especially on the case of one engineer who commented extensively on communication, articulating a view of engineering design as open, multi-participant, and multidisciplinary, with implications for how to conceptualize expertise in engineering problem solving.
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