ICED15 DO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS BENEFIT FROM PRE-ENGINEERING DESIGN EDUCATION? Udo Kannengiesser 1 , John S Gero 2 , John Wells 3 and Matthew Lammi 4 1 Metasonic GmbH, 2 UNCC, 3 VPI and 4 NC-State ABSTRACT This paper tests the hypothesis that the design cognition of high school students who have taken pre- engineering courses will be different to those who have not. The test is based on analysing and comparing two sets of design protocol studies for the respective groups of students. All design protocols are coded uniformly using the Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) ontology. The analysis in this paper focuses on three aspects: design issue distributions, cumulative design issues and cumulative design processes. The results show that there is no statistical support for the hypothesis that differences exist between the pre-engineering and non-engineering student groups. These unexpected results potentially have profound implications for high school pre-engineering education. 1 INTRODUCTION Elementary and secondary students are engaging in engineering activities in formal and informal settings across the United States. Engineering has also been making its way into elementary and secondary classrooms through numerous curricula and standards with design as the primary focus (Douglas 2001; Rogers 2006; Wells 2014). Although engineering design is becoming more common and accessible in K-12 venues, how these students go about design in engineering is not readily understood (Katehi et al. 2009; Schunn 2009; Silk and Schunn 2008). The aim of this research study was to further characterize student design cognition when engaged in engineering design problems. While engineering education literature in design has largely been dominated by discussions of pedagogical approaches, there have been several cognitive studies of designers aimed at elucidating design thinking behaviour. The most prevalent research method currently being used for such work is protocol analysis (Atman and Bursic 1998), which has become the basis of many recent cognitive studies of designers (Adams et al. 2003; Christensen and Schunn 2007; Cross et al. 1994; Kavakli and Gero 2002; Atman et al. 2007). The present study used protocol analysis as the experimental approach, founded on a design-ontology-based coding scheme derived from innovations in cognitive science. The coding scheme is based on a general design ontology, the Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) ontology (Gero 1990), which provides a design-based coding scheme (rather than either a task-based or an ad hoc scheme). This paper tests the foundational teaching and learning hypothesis that the design cognition of high school students who have taken pre-engineering courses will be different to those who have not. This test is based on a design cognition study involving two groups of high school juniors: those who have taken pre-engineering courses and those who have not. Equal numbers of dyad teams from both groups engaged in design-only sessions in which they generated solutions in response to the same design challenge. The design sessions were video- and audio-recorded. The recordings were transcribed and then segmented and coded using the Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) ontologically-based design issues coding scheme. The students’ design cognition was measured from the cumulative occurrence of the design issues and design activities. Both the design issues and the resulting design processes were compared between the two high school student groups. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the collection of protocol data from design experiments with the high school students, and the subsequent coding of the protocols in terms of sequences of design issues and the resulting sequences of design processes. Section 3 describes the statistical and cumulative occurrence analysis that was run over the datasets. Section 4 presents the results of the analysis including a comparison between engineering and non-engineering students. Section 5 concludes the paper with a discussion of the implications of the study.