Developing and Assessing Engineering Students' Cognitive Flexibility in the Domain of Sustainable Design

开发和评估工科学生在可持续设计领域的认知灵活性

• 批准号: 1811170
• 负责人: Elise Barrella
• 金额: $ 19.53万
• 依托单位: Wake Forest University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-08-31 至 2020-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1811170&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Developing; Assessing; Engineering; Students; Cognitive

Due to global trends in rising resource consumption and environmental degradation, numerous professional organizations like the National Academy of Engineering and the National Society of Professional Engineers have called on the engineering profession to address sustainable development in their projects and decision-making. For engineers to effectively contribute to global sustainable development, they must learn to understand and apply sustainability concepts in problem-solving and design. Typically in design classes, undergraduate students have difficulty integrating or building on knowledge from other engineering and non-engineering courses to evaluate the broader context for their decision-making. Therefore, the goal of this project is to develop and assess a sustainable design framework for instruction in upper-level design courses that develops students' ability to apply complex knowledge across different problem contexts. As potentially cross-cutting features of engineering curricula, "design" and "sustainability" represent an opportunity for integration and development of a unifying thread for engineering problem-solving.The proposed research uses a novel application of cognitive flexibility theory to the complex and ill-structured domain of sustainable engineering design, intended to prepare students for solving societal challenges of sustainable development. The project team seeks a better understanding of how students learn and how they use and transfer knowledge of sustainable design thinking, tools, and processes in new settings. Of particular importance is how these experiences help to make better engineers and could lead to better outcomes for all career destinations. The team will employ a mixed-methods approach to measure the depth and breadth of such learning. Guided by four research questions, it is anticipated that: (a) classification of real-world sustainable design problems will lead to an understanding and characterizing of complex problem solving domains and processes, (b) students' learning outcomes (cognitive, affective, social, and professional) will be assessed in order to understand how these problems enable cognitive abilities, (c) innovative instruments and assessment tools, that can be transferred across institutions, programs, departments, and experiences, will be developed, and (d) strategies for implementing complex sustainable design problem solving in engineering education will be investigated. Through this project a broad community of practice of engineering educators will be established across disciplines, as design instruction is incorporated into all accredited engineering programs and as the challenge of sustainable development is a call to all engineers.

由于全球资源消耗和环境恶化的趋势，许多专业组织，如美国国家工程院和美国国家专业工程师协会，呼吁工程专业在其项目和决策中解决可持续发展问题。为了有效地为全球可持续发展做出贡献，工程师必须学会理解并在解决问题和设计中应用可持续发展概念。通常在设计课程中，本科生很难整合或建立在其他工程和非工程课程的知识基础上，以评估他们决策的更广泛背景。因此，本项目的目标是开发和评估一个可持续的设计框架，用于上层设计课程的教学，培养学生在不同问题背景下应用复杂知识的能力。作为潜在的工程课程的交叉功能，“设计”和“可持续性”代表了一个机会，整合和发展的一个统一的线程工程problemsolving.The拟议的研究使用了一种新的应用认知灵活性理论的复杂和结构不良的域的可持续工程设计，旨在为学生解决可持续发展的社会挑战。项目团队寻求更好地了解学生如何学习，以及他们如何在新环境中使用和转移可持续设计思维，工具和流程的知识。特别重要的是，这些经验如何帮助成为更好的工程师，并可能导致更好的结果，为所有的职业目的地。该小组将采用混合方法来衡量这种学习的深度和广度。在四个研究问题的指导下，预计：（a）对现实世界的可持续设计问题进行分类，将有助于理解和描述复杂的问题解决领域和过程，（B）学生的学习成果（认知，情感，社会和专业）将进行评估，以了解这些问题如何使认知能力，（c）创新的工具和评估工具，（d）将研究在工程教育中解决复杂的可持续设计问题的战略。通过这个项目，将建立一个跨学科的工程教育工作者的广泛实践社区，因为设计教学被纳入所有经认证的工程项目，而且可持续发展的挑战是对所有工程师的召唤。