The effect of design education on creative design cognition of high school students

ABSTRACT

This paper presents results from a study exploring the relationship between design education and creative design cognition in high school students. Data from coded protocols of high school students with and without design education serve as the source. Audio/video recordings of student pairs engaged in a design task captured both their design approach and their concurrent design conversation. Following a verbal protocol methodology, videos were coded using the Function-Behaviour-Structure ontology coding scheme. This coding scheme was augmented by two further codes ‘new’ and ‘surprising’ as the basis for measuring design creativity. Results revealed significant differences between the two cohorts in creative design cognition, while no significant differences in general design cognition were found.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative design cognition
• protocol analysis
• creative codes
• FBS ontology

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation Grant Numbers EEC-1160345 and EEC-1463873. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the United States National Science Foundation Grants [Nos EEC-1160345 and EEC-1463873].