Effects of cognitive styles on

Introduction

This study researches the interactions between design students’ cognitive styles, and performance in 2D drafting
and design tasks in digital media

To get the information we need to know

• if there's any relationship between cognitive styles and design performance and 2D drafting
• if interactions between cognitive styles and performance in design tasks change through the 3 stages of the test process; conceptualize, develop, and final design?

Methodology

The experiment lasted 3 weeks. The students worked individually
and got the same instructions throughout the process.

the first week, the students received the design brief which specified design requirements of a small-scale architectural design project in detail.

They designed using AutoCAD during 3 course hours. At the end they submitted their works.

Last weeks and Meetings

• The second week, the students were allowed to develop their designs. they discussed their designs with the course instructor. The design works were also collected in that day.
• During the last week, students finalized their designs and submitted the final works.

Other procedures

• The students took the CSA to judge their cognitive style. Then the CAT to rate their creativity and technical quality of their work relative to one another and indepently.

The drafting performance was measured by a drafting exam which indicated how accurately and completely students drafted a given drawing with AutoCAD in a preset time.

Judging

• everything was measured by members of the design faculty considering only the students cognitive style against their design and drafting performance being rated via a 1 to 5 scale one being the lowest grade.

Results

W/A Dimension

V/I Dimension

CSA Grouping

• Analytic–Intermediate–Wholist dimension in one group (WA)
• and the Imager–Bimodal–Verbaliser on the other. (VI)

ANOVA tests were conducted to find out if the cognitive styles had effect on
the average creativity and technical quality per scores at the end of the process.

The test indicated that there were statistically significant creativity score differences
only on the VI dimension.

The Bonferroni test indicated that the average creativity scores of Imagers were significantly higher than the Verbalisers but no other significant difference was found.

The effects of cognitive styles on creative performance were analyzed in the 3 stages of the design process. There's no evidence that the interaction between cognitive styles and performance scores changed over the stages.

the relationships between cognitive styles and drafting performance, were calculated between the cognitive dimensions raw scores and the drafting performance scores.

A significant correlation was found between the VI raw and drafting scores

While the drafting scores seemed to be independent from the WA raw scores.

The Bonferroni test showed that the mean drafting scores of Imagers were significantly higher than that of Verbalisers. No other difference was significant.

Discussion

This study provided insights into the effects of cognitive styles of design students in several stages of design development in digital media. On the VI dimension, Imagers outperformed Verbalisers in both the average creativity and drafting scores.

Our findings supported Oxman’s theory and indicated that individuals who tended to ‘‘think with images’’ rather than to ‘‘think with words’’ were likely to be more creative in the design process.

The results of this study should be interpreted carefully, they are obtained from an educational design project based on individual creation.

In normal design projects, designers have to
negotiate with other designers and clients, ‘‘visual’’ translation of the ‘‘verbal’’ brief is a core skill, verbal work is an integral to all phases of design.

In the study, the data suggested that Imagers’ high creativity scores in the design tasks were partly due to their proficiency using the CAD tool. When the drafting performance

scores were controlled, the correlation between the VI raw scores and the average creativity scores were not significant.

This suggests that at the early stages of design education, students are limited by their capabilities of using design tools. On the WA dimension, there was no statistically significant difference among the

success levels of cognitive style groups.

Conclusion

At the beginning of the study, it was hypothesized that Analytic cognitive style might be better suited to the requirements of computer aided drafting and design. The data did not provide any evidence to support this argument.

At the beginning of the study, it was hypothesized that Analytic cognitive style might be
better suited to the requirements of computer aided drafting and design. The data did not provide any evidence to support this argument.

The development of user-friendly computer applications enabled design students to
attain similar levels of success in computer aided drafting and design tasks independent
from their positions on the WA spectrum

Educational implications of the findings of this study could be more significant, if
similar results were replicated in larger samples.

This study suggests that
monitoring cognitive styles of design students deserved further attention and might
facilitate for improving teaching strategies and course designs.