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

由于资源消耗和环境恶化的全球趋势，许多专业组织，如国家工程院和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。为了让工程师有效地为全球可持续发展做出贡献，他们必须学会在解决问题和设计时理解和应用可持续发展概念。通常，在设计课上，本科生很难整合或借鉴其他工程和非工程课程的知识，以评估他们决策的更广泛背景。因此，这个项目的目标是开发和评估一个可持续的设计框架，用于高级设计课程的教学，发展学生在不同问题背景下应用复杂知识的能力。作为工程学课程潜在的交叉特征，“设计”和“可持续发展”代表了一个整合和发展工程问题解决的统一线索的机会。本研究将认知灵活性理论应用于可持续工程设计这一复杂和结构不良的领域，旨在帮助学生为解决可持续发展的社会挑战做好准备。项目团队寻求更好地了解学生如何学习，以及他们如何在新的环境中使用和传递可持续设计思维、工具和过程的知识。尤其重要的是，这些经历如何帮助培养更好的工程师，并为所有职业目标带来更好的结果。该团队将采用一种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)现实世界可持续设计问题的分类将导致对复杂问题解决领域和过程的理解和特征，(B)将评估学生的学习结果(认知、情感、社会和专业)以了解这些问题如何增强认知能力，(C)将开发可跨机构、项目、部门和经验转移的创新工具和评估工具，以及(D)将在工程教育中实施复杂可持续设计问题解决的策略将被调查。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，可持续发展的挑战是对所有工程师的呼唤。

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.