Sunni Haag Newton

Cognitive Fatigue During Testing: An Examination of Trait, Time-on-Task, and Strategy Influences

What are the consequences of testing over an extended period? We report a study of 4 hr of nearly continuous testing on two verbal tests (Cloze and Completion). Prior to the testing session, participants completed a series of nonability trait measures, including selected personality and motivation scales. During the study, participants (N = 99) were also administered a series of subjective fatigue and affect measures. We examined the effect of increasing time-on-task on performance and subjective fatigue, along with the relative influences of trait measures in predicting individual differences in subjective fatigue as time-on-task increased. In addition, we examined whether performance strategy differences were associated with either performance or subjective fatigue measures. Results indicated a dissociation between subjective fatigue (increasing over time-on-task) and performance measures (which were stable or showed slight improvements as time-on-task increased). Trait complexes accounted for significant amounts of variance in subjective fatigue and positive affect over the course of the test session. Performance strategies of overactivity, withdrawal, and mixed overactivity and withdrawal were identified, and correlates of the strategies were examined. Implications for analyzing performance strategies to evaluate reactions to cognitive fatigue, and the prediction of individual differences in cognitive fatigue during testing are discussed.

The Development and Effects of Teaching Perspective Free-Hand Sketching in Engineering Design

As Computer-Aided Design software has become more advanced, the use of hand-drawn engineering drawings has greatly diminished. This reduction has led to free-hand sketching becoming less emphasized in engineering education. While many engineering curriculums formerly included courses dedicated entirely to sketching and hand drafting, these topics are no longer addressed by most current curriculums. However, it has been observed that sketching has many benefits including improved communication in the design process, idea generation exercises, and visualizing design ideas in threedimensional space. While isometric sketching has long been the preferred method in engineering curriculums, there are benefits of teaching perspective sketching including the creation of more realistic sketches for communication and idea generation. This paper presents the development of a perspectivebased sketching curriculum and the study of how this method compares to more traditional methods of teaching sketching to students in a freshman level engineering graphics course. The results show that the perspective-based sketching method leads to equivalent gains in spatial visualization skills and final design self-efficacy as the traditional method of teaching hand sketching. While maintaining these skills, the new method also taught students additional skills. Through surveys and interviews, the students expressed that these skills would be useful to them in their future coursework and careers. INTRODUCTION Several benefits have been found for teaching engineering students how to sketch. These include improving visualization skills, serving as stepping stones in the development of effective prototypes, and assisting in the design process by providing a method of tracking and developing ideas [1-5]. The traditional method of teaching sketching does prepare students to use the more modern CAD methods of creating representations by focusing on the sketching of simple objects in two-dimensional and isometric views and less on techniques to draw an object in realistic three-dimensions such as shading and perspective. While the CAD-focused method has been found useful in some applications, it runs the risk of missing out on benefits such as being able to quickly sketch to communicate an idea. Improving spatial visualization skills is often a critical outcome for CAD and visualization courses. Sorby (2009) says that the best way to improve these spatial skills is to “sketch, sketch, sketch” [1], but the more traditional method taught in engineering course does not focus on freehand sketching. Therefore, in a freshman-level mechanical/aerospace engineering course at Georgia Tech, we have begun to develop a more form and technique-based method of teaching free-hand sketching that is more commonly found in an Industrial Design or Architecture course. As spatial visualization has been found important in many fields, there have been several tools developed to test these skills including the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test (PSVT) developed by Bodner and Guay (1997) and revised by Yoon (2011) and the Mental Rotation Test (MRT) developed by Vandenburg & Kuse (1978) and Peters (2006) [6-11]. Also, curriculum changes or additions could affect Self-Efficacy for Engineering Design. Therefore, Carberry (2010) developed a method to determine design self-efficacy through four aspects: confidence, motivation, perceived success, and anxiety in performing engineering design tasks [12]. Proceedings of the ASME 2016 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE 2016 August 21-24, 2016, Charlotte, North Carolina

Incorporating industrial design pedagogy into a mechanical engineering graphics course: a discipline-based education research (DBER) approach

BackgroundA redesigned curriculum for teaching engineering graphics was adopted in an introductory mechanical engineering course. The rollout of this curriculum was staggered, allowing for comparisons of student perceptions across the newly revised and previous instructional approaches. The new curriculum borrows from content and pedagogy traditionally employed in industrial design courses. The discipline-based education research (DBER) framework was used to investigate the manner in which the new curriculum was implemented and student reactions to this change. By using this approach, the researchers were able to incorporate and emphasize the unique aspects of the subject matter itself, as well as the attributes of the engineering discipline in which the course was embedded.ResultsResults indicated that students exhibited positive reactions to the sketching instruction, as well as various other aspects of the course, and that reactions were generally more positive among students in the redesigned course.ConclusionsThe contributions of this paper are twofold: illustrating the application of a specific research framework and providing results of an investigation of a redesigned curriculum. The redesigned curriculum was generally received well by students, and the partnership between the education researchers and faculty proved fruitful in allowing for nuanced investigation of the course redesign. Practical considerations for undertaking this type of research are also outlined.