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In this paper we report on an in‐depth study of engineering design processes. Specifically, we extend our previous research on engineering student design processes to compare the design behavior of students and expert engineers. Nineteen experts from a variety of engineering disciplines and industries each designed a playground in a lab setting, and gave verbal reports of their thoughts during the design task. Measures of their design processes and solution quality were compared to pre‐existing data from 26 freshmen and 24 seniors. The experts spent significantly more time on the task overall and in each stage of engineering design, including significantly more time problem scoping. The experts also gathered significantly more information covering more categories. Results support the argument that problem scoping and information gathering are major differences between advanced engineers and students, and important competencies for engineering students to develop. Timeline representations of the expert designers' processes illustrate characteristic distinctions we found and may help students gain insights into their own design processes.

How is historical knowledge transmitted across generations? What is the role of schooling in that transmission? The authors address these questions by reporting on a thirty-month longitudinal study into how home, school, and larger society served as contexts for the development of historical consciousness among adolescents. Fifteen families drawn from three different school communities participated. By adopting an intergenerational approach, the authors sought to understand how the defining moments of one generation-its \"lived history\"'-becomes the \"available history\" to the next. In this article, the authors focus on what parents and children shared about one of the most formative historical events in parents' lives: the Vietnam War. Drawing on notions of collective memory, as articulated by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the authors sought to understand which stories, archived in historical memory and available to the disciplinary community, are remembered and used by those beyond its borders. In contrast, which stories are no longer widely shared, eclipsed by time's passage and unable to cross the bridge separating generation from generation? The authors conclude by discussing the forces that act to historicize today's youth and suggest how educators might marshal these forces-rather than spurning or simply ignoring them-to advance young people's historical understanding.

Academically able history students (n = 10) from 2 high schools reflecting different ideological commitments and approaches to academic excellence were asked to think aloud as they read current newspaper articles on 2 topics: school prayer and Starbucks' treatment of its Guatemalan coffee workers. The purpose was to explore how adolescents use their knowledge of history when interpreting current affairs during an everyday activity of political and cultural life. Principal findings are: (a) Students expressed their thoughts with the aid of background narratives that contrasted how things were at some point \"back then\" and how things are now, (b) the 2 groups used different historical events and ideas to simultaneously enunciate their background narratives and contextualize each news-story case, and (c) students with different background narratives represented the facts of the same news story differently. Conclusions address cultural resources students exploited (common frameworks of historical eras and of core values, interpreted here as key orienting devices for political talk in the public sphere), and the challenge to earlier research portraying adolescents as \"presentist.\"

This study examines the process by which students do (and don't) use their school history knowledge when reading the news. Academically able history students (n = 10) from two schools that reflected different ideological commitments were asked to think aloud as they read current newspaper articles on school prayer, Starbucks' treatment of its Guatemalan coffee workers, removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina's statehouse dome, and U.S. intervention in the Bosnian war. Analyses focus on how students use their history knowledge to interpret current affairs. Three analyses comprise the study. The first examines the historical events and ideas students mentioned. The second examines the students' interpretive styles. The third looks more closely at the performance of an exemplary student who exhibited generative thinking that extended his initial learning, and presents a close study of his argumentation. Principal findings include: (1) To engage a topic, both groups used common frameworks of historical eras (periodization) and shared value terms and questions (interpreted here as key orienting devices for political talk in the public sphere). (2) However, the two groups used different background narratives (which contrasted how things were at some point “back then” and how things are “now”) and interpretive styles, and these frameworks differentiated the two groups' historical outlooks and news story interpretations. (3) The exemplary student examined displayed an argumentation modeling frame, in which he simultaneously elaborated: (a) a representation of the situation (the contemporary event in historical context), by implicitly asking how novel the newspaper claims, and (b) his own policy position, by implicitly asking how valid the newspaper claims. Findings suggest students are socialized into frameworks for using the past that influence the history they apply, with implications for their future learning. Conclusions address the cultural resources students exploited, the relation between the psychological representation of history and the organization of public discourse in American society, and what we might learn from the exemplary student in this study.

Published models of the engineering design process are widely available and often illustrated for students with a block diagram showing design as sequential and iterative. Here we examine experts’ conceptions of the design process in relation to a model synthesized from several introductory engineering textbooks. How do experts’ conceptions compare? What might they see as alternative accounts? We present preliminary results from an investigation of practicing engineers (n=19) who were asked to think aloud while reading a description of this “textbook” model, as well as draw their idea of the engineering design process and choose descriptors of design. Only 3 participants were found to have a view in major disagreement with the model, yet 7 drew alternative types of diagrams, and the experts as a whole emphasized problem scoping and communication. We focus especially on the case of one engineer who commented extensively on communication, articulating a view of engineering design as open, multi-participant, and multidisciplinary, with implications for how to conceptualize expertise in engineering problem solving. Engineering textbooks have traditionally introduced students to engineering design by way of a block diagram. Although these diagrams vary slightly from one textbook to the next, the iconic diagram encloses each stage of the process in a block and depicts flow through the stages using arrows, typically double-ended to signify iteration between phases. Figure 1 is one example of the linear depiction of the engineering design process popularized in textbooks over the last several decades (Dixon,1 as cited in Bucciarelli,2 p.93). The number of stages in these diagrams has ranged from a few to several dozen (see, for example, Woodson3), depending on the detail and complexity with which the design process is rendered. In a content analysis of seven introductory engineering design textbooks conducted in 1995, Atman and her colleagues4 synthesized the texts’ depictions into a six-step model: 1. Problem Definition, 2. Information Gathering, 3. Generation of Alternative Solutions, 4. Analysis/Evaluation, 5. Selection, and 6. Implementation/Communication. “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education”