2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this study was to compare the cognitive and neurocognitive measures of students when thinking in systems. Systems thinking is critical for engineering students to solve complex and ill-structured design problems. Systems thinking requires making connections between disparate pieces of information and using these connections to generate new ideas and relationships. Concept mapping is a tool for systems thinking. We asked (n=28) engineering students to develop concept maps while we measured changes in the oxygenated hemoglobin in their prefrontal cortex. Increased oxygenated hemoglobin is a proxy for increased cognitive effort. We then asked students to develop design problem statements and measured the uniqueness of their problem statements using the semantic distance between words. Data analysis is ongoing, but greater cognitive effort while concept mapping positively correlated with more semantically different problem statements. The more cognitive effort spent on concept mapping, the better students’ subsequent performance designing. These findings advance our understanding of brain behavior and student performance and provide new insights about the benefits of design techniques, like concept mapping, to enhance engineering students’ design ability. This research is supported through the NSF Program in Research in the Formation of Engineers.