Data-enabled cognitive modeling: Validating student engineers' fuzzy design-based decision-making in a virtual design problem

摘要

The ability of future engineering professionals to solve complex real-world problems depends on their design education and training. Because engineers engage with open-ended problems in which there are unknown parameters and multiple competing objectives, they engage in fuzzy decision-making, a method of making decisions that takes into account inherent imprecisions and uncertainties in the real world. In the design-based decision-making field, few studies have applied fuzzy decision-making models to actual decision-making process data. Thus, in this study, we use datasets on student decision-making processes to validate approximate fuzzy models of student decision-making, which we call data-enabled cognitive modeling. The results of this study (1) show that simulated design problems provide rich datasets that enable analysis of student design decision-making and (2) validate models of student design cognition that can inform future design curricula and help educators understand how students think about design problems.