The Mind of Engineering Students
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009Cognitive designers create artifacts that induce specific mental states (thoughts and feelings) and/or enhance specific mental processes (perception, learning, memory, decision-making, creativity, etc.) in the people that use them. To do this systematically the cognitive designer must have empirical insight into how the mind of their target audience works. So I am always on the look out for scientific studies that reveal the cognitive biases, dominate metaphors, mental models, problem solving heuristics and other inner mental workings of particular groups.
An excellent example is the recent study, Engineering Stereotypes Drive Counter Productive Practices. In the study, researchers from Northwestern and the University of Colorado give us insights into the mental model held by some engineering students on what it means to be an engineer. For example:
“There’s a stereotype that engineers do things by themselves,” Leonardi says. “So when students are asked to work in teams, they think, am I going to be disadvantaged? When I go to the workplace am I not going to be as valuable?” In other words, students believed that if they weren’t able to do a project alone, they couldn’t consider themselves an expert engineer.”
