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: 2038244
• 负责人: Robin Anderson
• 金额: $ 6.57万
• 依托单位: James Madison University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-07-01 至 2021-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2038244&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.

由于全球资源消费和环境退化的趋势趋势，诸如国家工程学院和国家专业工程师学会等众多专业组织都呼吁工程专业解决其项目和决策中的可持续发展。为了使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中理解和应用可持续性概念。通常，在设计课程中，本科生难以整合或基于其他工程和非工程课程的知识来评估其决策的更广泛背景。因此，该项目的目标是在高层设计课程中开发和评估一个可持续的设计框架，以发展学生在不同问题环境中应用复杂知识的能力。作为工程课程的潜在跨切割功能，“设计”和“可持续性”代表了整合和开发用于工程问题解决问题的统一线程的机会。拟议的研究使用了认知灵活性理论的新颖应用， - 可持续工程设计的结构领域，旨在为学生准备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的学习方式，以及如何使用和转移对新环境中的可持续设计思维，工具和流程的知识。尤其重要的是，这些经验如何帮助建立更好的工程师，并可以为所有职业目的地带来更好的成果。该团队将采用一种混合方法来衡量此类学习的深度和广度。在四个研究问题的指导下，可以预见：（a）现实世界中可持续设计问题的分类将导致对复杂问题解决域和过程的理解和表征，（b）学生的学习成果（认知，情感，社会，社会， ，并且将评估专业），以了解这些问题如何实现认知能力，（c）可以在机构，计划，部门，部门和经验中转移的创新工具和评估工具，以及（d）策略为了实施复杂的可持续设计问题，将在工程教育中解决。通过该项目，将在各个学科中建立广泛的工程教育实践社区，因为设计指导被纳入了所有认可的工程计划中，并且随着可持续发展的挑战是对所有工程师的呼吁。