Knowledge Representation in Engineering Design: An Initial Investigation

Engineering design is a domain in which a number of complex problem solving activities occur. As in all such tasks, cognitive processes operate upon the internal representations of the task as well as upon other relevant knowledge. These representations can change over the course of experience in order to enable a person to better respond to the problems and challenges of a domain. The time course of these representation changes is a reflection of the structure and content of a domain as well as the cognitive learning mechanisms responsible for the changes. The goal of the work presented here is to identify some of the characteristic differences that distinguish experts and novices in this domain. While these studies only include freshman and senior engineering students, there are a number of interesting findings, and there are plans to extend this work to professional engineers. The first study utilizes a recall paradigm that has been employed by a number of researchers looking at expert/novice differences (e.g., Chase & Simon, 1973). The second study uses Latent Semantic Analysis (Deerwester, Dumais, Furnas, & Landauer, 1990) as a methodological tool to aid in exploring and analyzing the content of students’ representations.