Selected Core Thinking Skills and Cognitive Strategy of an Expert and Novice Engineer

Understanding how students learn engineering design concepts and the subsequent instructional interventions that are directed to improve their performance is also contingent on understanding how experts in the various engineering disciplines solve engineering problems. Naturally, a part of the engineering and technology educators’ research agenda is aimed at gaining a better insight of how student and expert engineers solve specific engineering problems. This hopefully would lead to a larger body of knowledge that is accessible for administrators and teachers to make informed decisions about the teaching of engineering design concepts. Over the past two decades a steady proliferation of studies in engineering problem solving have focused on the differences between expert and novice designers (Cross, 2002, 2004), design reasoning and thinking (Goldschmid & Weil, 1998), creativity and design (Christiaans & Venselaar, 2005; Dost & Cross, 2001) and the design processes and strategies of engineering students (Atman & Bursic, 1998; Cardella, Atman,