The Role of Functionality in the Mental Representations of Engineering Students: Some Differences in the Early Stages of Expertise

As engineers gain experience and become experts in their domain, the structure and content of their knowledge changes. Two studies are presented that examine differences in knowledge representation among freshman and senior engineering students. The first study examines recall of mechanical devices and chunking of components, and the second examines whether seniors represent devices in a more abstract functional manner than do freshmen. The most prominent differences between these 2 groups involve their representation of the functioning of groups of electromechanical components and how these groups of components interact to produce device behavior. Seniors are better able to construct coherent representations of devices by focusing on the function of sets of components in the device. The findings from these studies highlight some ways in which the structure and content of mental representations of design knowledge differ during the early stages of expertise acquisition.

[1]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The Sciences of the Artificial , 1970 .

[2]  J. Reitman,et al.  Knowledge organization and skill differences in computer programmers , 1981, Cognitive Psychology.

[3]  T. Landauer,et al.  Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis , 1990 .

[4]  Barbara Tversky,et al.  Diagrams and Descriptions in Acquiring Complex Systems , 2019, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

[5]  Shuang Song,et al.  IDENTIFYING SHARED UNDERSTANDING IN DESIGN USING DOCUMENT ANALYSIS , 2001 .

[6]  F. Gobet.  Expert memory: a comparison of four theories , 1998, Cognition.

[7]  G. Miller,et al.  Cognitive science. , 1981, Science.

[8]  Judith S Reitman,et al.  Skilled perception in Go: Deducing memory structures from inter-response times , 1976, Cognitive Psychology.

[9]  Michael D. Lee,et al.  Decision Making and Confidence Given Uncertain Advice , 2006, Cogn. Sci..

[10]  John R. Anderson,et al.  Abstract Planning and Perceptual Chunks: Elements of Expertise in Geometry , 1990, Cogn. Sci..

[11]  Anna L. Theakston,et al.  Errors of Omission in English-Speaking Children's Production of Plurals and the Past Tense: The Effects of Frequency, Phonology, and Competition , 2006, Cogn. Sci..

[12]  Walter Kintsch,et al.  A Computational Theory of Complex Problem Solving Using Latent Semantic Analysis , 2002 .

[13]  Cynthia J. Atman,et al.  A comparison of freshman and senior engineering design processes , 1999 .

[14]  A. Ehrenfeucht,et al.  Conceptualizing in Assembly Tasks , 1988 .

[15]  Cindy E. Hmelo,et al.  Problem-Based Learning: Effects on the Early Acquisition of Cognitive Skill in Medicine , 1998 .

[16]  Kristin L. Wood,et al.  Formal Engineering Design Synthesis: Function-Based Synthesis Methods in Engineering Design , 2001 .

[17]  Ian Dennis,et al.  Cognitive processes in engineering design: a longitudinal study , 1994 .

[18]  Robert P. Smith,et al.  An Observational Study of Design Team Process: A Comparison of Student and Professional Engineers , 1998 .

[19]  Dorothea P. Simon,et al.  Expert and Novice Performance in Solving Physics Problems , 1980, Science.

[20]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  Five seconds or sixty? Presentation time in expert memory , 2000 .

[21]  Jonathan Cagan,et al.  Learning from design experience in an agent-based design system , 2004 .

[22]  Allen Newell,et al.  Human Problem Solving. , 1973 .

[23]  Jonathan Evans,et al.  Problem-solving Strategies and Expertise in Engineering Design. , 1997 .

[24]  Kristin L. Wood,et al.  Development of a Functional Basis for Design , 2000 .

[25]  Judith S Reitman,et al.  Organization revealed by recall orders and confirmed by pauses , 1980, Cognitive Psychology.

[26]  V. Goel.  Sketches of thought , 1995 .

[27]  P. Feltovich,et al.  The nature of conceptual understanding in biomedicine : the deep structure of complex ideas and the development of misconceptions , 1988 .

[28]  D E Egan,et al.  Chunking in recall of symbolic drawings , 1979, Memory & cognition.

[29]  Paul J. Feltovich,et al.  Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices , 1981, Cogn. Sci..

[30]  Sachiko Komagata.  Comparing expert and novice understanding of a complex system from the perspective of structures, behaviors, and functions. , 2004 .

[31]  D. R. Lehman,et al.  Teaching reasoning. , 1987, Science.

[32]  H B Richman,et al.  Simulation of expert memory using EPAM IV. , 1995, Psychological review.

[33]  T. Landauer,et al.  A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge. , 1997 .

[34]  Linden J. Ball,et al.  Structured and opportunistic processing in design: a critical discussion , 1995, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[35]  David Andreoff Evans,et al.  Cognitive Science in Medicine: Biomedical Modeling , 1989 .

[36]  H. Simon,et al.  Perception in chess , 1973 .

[37]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The Sciences of the Artificial , 1970 .