Examining design cognition coding schemes for P-12 engineering/technology education

Cultivating students’ design abilities can be highly beneficial for the learning of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts, and development of higher-order thinking capabilities (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council in STEM integration in k-12 education: status, prospects, and an agenda for research, The National Academies Press, Washington, 2014). Therefore, examining students’ strategies, how they distribute their cognitive effort, and confront STEM concepts during design experiences, can help educators identify effective and developmentally appropriate methods for teaching and scaffolding design activities for students (National Research Council in standards for k-12 engineering education? The National Academies Press, Washington, 2010). Yet, educational researchers have only recently begun examining students’ engineering design cognition at the P-12 level, despite reports such as Standards for K-12 Engineering Education? (National Research Council 2010) designating this area of research as lackluster. Of the recent studies that have investigated engineering design cognition at the P-12 level, the primary method of investigation has been verbal protocol analysis using a think-aloud method (Grubbs in further characterization of high school pre- and non-engineering students’ cognitive activity during engineering design, 2016). This methodology captures participants’ verbalization of their thought process as they solve a design challenge. Analysis is typically conducted by applying a pre-determined coding scheme, or one that emerges, to determine the distribution of a group’s or an individual’s cognition. Consequently, researchers have employed a variety of coding schemes to examine and describe students’ design cognition. Given the steady increase of explorations into connections between P-12 engineering design cognition and development of student cognitive competencies, it becomes increasingly important to understand and choose the most appropriate coding schemes available, as each has its own intent and characteristics. Therefore, this article presents an examination of recent P-12 design cognition coding schemes with the purpose of providing a background for selecting and applying a scheme for a specific outcome, which can better enable the synthesis and comparison of findings across studies. Ultimately, the aim is to aid others in choosing an appropriate coding scheme, with cognizance of research analysis intent and characteristics of research design, while improving the intentional scaffolding and support of design challenges.     

Challenges for Empirical Research on RPM

This article discusses the empirical challenges that researchers face when demonstrating the existence and effects of resale price maintenance (RPM). We outline three approaches for finding price effects of RPM and the corresponding hurdles in data and methodology. We show that the quantity test that was suggested by Posner (Univ Chic Law Rev 45(1):1–20, 1977; Univ Chic Law Rev 48:6–26, 1981) does not identify the change to welfare when demand-enhancing effects are considered generally. Finally, we present some solutions to the challenge of identifying welfare effects, and we suggest guidelines for future research.     

Sketching by design: teaching sketching to young learners

Recent science educational reforms in the United States have prompted increased efforts to teach engineering design as an approach to improve STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) learning in K-12 classrooms. Teaching design in early grades is a new endeavor for teachers in the United States. Much can be learned from design teaching and research on K-12 design education outside of the US. The purpose of this study was to explore how students learn and use design sketching to support their learning of science and design practices. Researchers provided a treatment of design sketching instruction based on best practices of prior research finding (Hope in Des Technol Educ Int J 10: 43–53, 2005; Gustafson et al. J Technol Educ 19(1):19–34, 2007). A delayed treatment model was used to provide a two-group counterbalanced quasi-experimental design to compare an experimental group and comparison (delayed treatment) group results from (6) grade 3 classrooms. Researchers employed Hope’s Des Technol Educ Int J 10: 43–53, (2005) frame to organize sketching data for analysis. Findings from this study indicated that design instruction treatment did improve student’s design and communication practices, moving from using sketching as a container of ideas to the use of sketching as a form of design communication and to refine design ideas. Both the treatment and comparison groups improved sketching skills after treatment was provided to both groups. Sketching is a design practice that can also help student learn science concepts through the generation of mental models of conceptual understanding.     

Exploring pupils’ beliefs about designers and designing

The purpose of this paper is to report on an investigation into pupil beliefs about designers and designing conducted as part of a research project focussing on Designerly Activity in Secondary Design and Technology which builds upon a pilot study (Barlex and Trebell in Int J Technol Design Educ, 2007). Four research questions drove this element of the study: (a) What do pupils believe designers do? (b) What do pupils believe about the knowledge and skills designers must possess? (c) What do pupils believe designers are like? (d) What do pupils believe about the design decisions made by the designer of a given product? This paper compliments the work of Welch et al. (Designing the future: The design and technology association international research conference 2006, University of Wolverhampton, Telford, 2006) relating to student beliefs about designers and designing by drawing on some elements of the research design to inform this study. Pupil responses to questions relating to the role of the designer, what designers are like and what designers need to know are in line with the findings of Welch et al. (Designing the future: The design and technology association international research conference 2006, University of Wolverhampton, Telford, 2006) in their study of elementary students beliefs about designers and designing with both studies concluding that the qualities ascribed to the designer are positive and non-stereotypical—they can be young or old, female or male.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">GTE Sylvania</Emphasis> and Interbrand Competition as the Primary Concern of Antitrust Law

Footnote 19 of the landmark U.S. antitrust decision in Continental T.V. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc. 433 U.S. 36 (1977) declares that “Interbrand competition … is the primary concern of antitrust law.” We trace the antecedents and influence of this declaration, argue that it is inappropriate, and conclude that it should be abandoned.     

Applying Target Costing in the Development of Marketable and Environmentally Friendly Products from Swine Waste

Management of swine waste generated in the United States is a challenging problem facing engineers, farmers, scientists, regulators, and policy-makers. Technologies for processing and storing swine waste have not been fully developed and refined in a manner acceptable to the public and environmental regulators. The primary concerns with improperly disposed swine waste are the effects on human and livestock health, surface and groundwater quality, air quality, and conservation of nitrogen fertilizers (Hagenstein 2003 Hagenstein, P. R. 2003. Air Emissions from Animal Feeding Operations: Current Knowledge, Future Needs, Washington, D. C.: National Research Council, National Academy Press.  [Google Scholar]).

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the concept of target costing by applying it to a very specific example: the production of biomethanol from swine manure. This study summarizes the analyses that outline a design and calculate a preliminary cost estimate for a proposed system for producing biomethanol from swine manure (initial process). In this study the target costing process is demonstrated with calculation of a target cost. This article also demonstrates an application of value engineering as a systematic, interdisciplinary examination of factors affecting the cost of a product so as to find means to fulfill the product's specified purpose at the required standards of quality and reliability and at an acceptable cost.

The article is organized as follows. First, the purpose of applying target costing methodology to the development of marketable by-products from swine manure is outlined. Next, target cost is calculated for biomethanol made from swine manure based on current methanol prices and currently available subsidies for biomethanol made from swine manure. A system for producing biomethanol from swine manure is described. The current cost is calculated for producing biomethanol. Concepts of value engineering are employed to reduce a significant cost component of the initial process resulting in Process II. Finally, value engineering is employed the second time to further reduce the cost of Process II yielding Process III.     

MICROCOMPUTER SOFTWARE COSTING LESS THAN $1000 FOR ECONOMIC AND MULTI-ATTRIBUTE DECISION ANALYSIS∗

Commodity price simulation is useful in many engineering economics applications, yet discrete approximations of the continuous stochastic processes used in modeling commodity prices are not always straightforward. This article describes the exact solution for discretely simulating the Schwartz and Smith (2000 Schwartz, E. and Smith, J. E. 2000. Short-term variations and long-term dynamics in commodity prices. Management Science, 46(7): 893–911. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) two-factor model of commodity prices.     

Corruption in Asia: Pervasiveness and arbitrariness

How does one understand the differences and similarities of corruption among various Asian countries? We use a recent framework developed by Rodriguez, Uhlenbruck, and Eden (2005) to suggest that corruption has to be examined from two different dimensions: pervasiveness and arbitrariness. Using this framework, we ask why some Asian countries are able to achieve high levels of economic growth in the midst of high level corruption while other countries suffer from economic stagnation. We specifically suggest that more firms would bribe when pervasiveness is high, while fewer firms would bribe when arbitrariness is high. We also look into the implications on foreign direct investment.     

Resale Price Maintenance Post Leegin: A Model of RPM Incentives

The prominent Babies R Us decision (McDonough et al. v. Toys R Us, Inc., 2009) was the first to explore the economic consequences of resale price maintenance after the Supreme Court’s Leegin decision. Previously, litigation concerned the presence or absence of an agreement; but that changed with the new jurisprudence which instead emphasized the restraint’s direct anti-competitive effects. While the district court’s decision in the Babies R Us case rested on the factual circumstances of the case, it did not have before it an economic model through which those facts could be integrated. This paper offers such a model, the predicates of which are drawn from the case. The conclusions derived from the model are entirely consistent with the court’s decision     

State of Play: How Do College Football Programs Compete for Student Athletes?

Each year high school football players sign letters of intent with college football programs. The NCAA governs this matching market with strict rules that are designed to protect amateurism. DuMond et al. (J Sports Econ 9(1):67–87, 2008) develop a model of athlete choice. I consider the matching puzzle from the program’s perspective: What factors increase the likelihood that a school will successfully recruit an athlete? Like DuMond et al., I find that the state of play matters. However, my results suggest that football programs are willing to recruit outside their borders. In addition, the results align with prior findings about cheating in the NCAA. This extends the literature on college sport recruiting and may provide insight into other matching puzzles in academic, medical, and business job markets.     

The growth of the firm in (and out of) emerging economies

Starting with Peng and Heath (Academy of Management Review, 21: 492–528, 1996), the growth of the firm in emerging economies (EE) has received increasing attention in the literature in the last two decades. This line of research has not only extended our knowledge on firms’ strategic choices to the context of EE, but also proposed new perspectives on the growth of the firm. Leveraging prior research, this article focuses on three major modes for firm growth—organic, acquisitive, and network-based. For each mode, we identify new themes and insights emerging from the last two decades of research. They center on (1) compositional capabilities and frugal innovations for organic growth, (2) business groups and cross-border acquisitions for acquisitive growth, and (3) network capitalism and institutional transitions for network-based growth. Overall, we not only identify new themes and insights, but also outline important yet unresolved debates as future research directions.     

A review of: “ENGINEERING ECONOMY, 4th. Ed.” By E. Paul DeGarmo The Macmillan Company 1967 532 pp. $10.95.

A risk measure, expected opportunity loss (EOL), is introduced to quantify the potential loss of making an incorrect choice in risk-based decision making. Different from Savage's (1951 Savage, L. J. 1951. The theory of statistical decision. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 46(253): 55–67. [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) minimax regret principle, EOL can account for the unbounded continuous random outcomes of alternatives and decision makers’ acceptable risk. This article studies the effects of the forms of loss function, correlation among outcomes, and the acceptable risk on the ranking results by considering the loss function in the power form. The results show that the loss functions and the outcomes correlations can significantly influence the rankings of alternatives in risk-based decision making.     

Double vision: Insights about the origin and interpretation of multiple IRRs

The ability of a project's internal rate of return (IRR) to quantify its economic return has been questioned by many scholars over the past 60 years, most recently by Magni (2010 Magni, C.A. (2010) Average internal rate of return and investment decisions: a new perspective. The Engineering Economist, 55(2), 150–180. [Google Scholar], 2013 Magni, C.A. (2013) The internal rate of return approach and the AIRR paradigm: a refutation and a corroboration. The Engineering Economist, 58(2), 73–111. [Google Scholar]). Although IRR is a plausible—albeit imperfect—measure of a project's economic return when the cash flow stream is conventional, IRR can be an untenable measure of an unconventional project's economic return. The goal of this article is to identify a simple, intuitive explanation of IRR, one that can be applied to any cash flow pattern. To do this, the article shows how a project's IRR systematically changes when it first crosses from the conventional into the unconventional realm (i.e., a small cash outflow is appended to a conventional cash flow stream) and then as it becomes progressively more unconventional. This process reveals that the most robust economic interpretation of IRR—for both conventional and unconventional projects—is that a project's IRRs are external benchmarks that divide the set of all plausible discount rates into positive and negative net present value (NPV) ranges, rather than internally generated returns. Because it can be difficult to estimate a project's cost of capital with precision, this information can help guide the sensitivity analysis of a project.     

A review of: “APPLIED ECONOMIC ANALYSIS FOR TECHNOLOGISTS,ENGINEERS, AND MANAGERS ” BY MICHAEL S. BOWMAN Prentice-Hall,Inc., Upper Saddle River,New Jersey, 1999, xii + 561 pp., ISBN: 0-13-375932-6, List: $76.75.

In their recent paper Tang and Tang (2003 Tang, S. L. and Tang, H. J. 2003. The variable financial indicator IRR and the constant economic indicator NPV.. The Engineering Economist, Vol. 48(No. 1): pp. 69–78. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], pp. 69–78) revive a longstanding controversy—net present value (NPV) versus internal rate of return (IRR)—by characterizing the NPV as an economic indicator and the IRR as a financial one. The paper implies that this distinction justifies ranking financial alternatives by ranking their IRRs. In the current article, it is argued that the direct IRR ranking does not necessarily provide the same evaluation environment—and therefore a fair comparison—for each alternative involved, and that the incremental ranking approach is needed to remedy this shortcoming. The article also points out that Tang and Tang's numerical examples of simple projects with one sign change in their cash flow patterns do not address the problem of multiple IRRs, which consequently renders Tang and Tang's ranking approach dysfunctional. It is demonstrated that the concept of a true rate of return, substituting for the non-performing IRR and applied in conjunction with the incremental approach, provides an adequate tool for ranking mutually exclusive projects or a project's technical or financial alternatives.     

Preventives Versus Treatments Redux: Tighter Bounds on Distortions in Innovation Incentives with an Application to the Global Demand for HIV Pharmaceuticals

Kremer and Snyder (Q J Econ 130:1167–1239, 2015) show that demand curves for a preventive and treatment may have different shapes though they target the same disease, biasing the pharmaceutical manufacturer toward developing the lucrative rather than the socially desirable product. This paper tightens the theoretical bounds on the potential deadweight loss from such biases. Using a calibration of the global demand for HIV pharmaceuticals, we demonstrate the dramatically sharper analysis achievable with the new bounds, allowing us to pinpoint potential deadweight loss at 62% of the global gain from curing HIV. We use the calibration to perform policy counterfactuals, assessing welfare effects of government policies such as a subsidy, reference pricing, and price-discrimination ban. The fit of our calibration is good: we find that a hypothetical drug monopolist would price an HIV drug so high that only 4% of the infected population worldwide would purchase, matching actual drug prices and quantities in the early 2000s before subsidies in low-income countries ramped up.     

Deconstructing the Tower of Babel: a design method to improve empathy and teamwork competences of informatics students

The competence-based education recently launched in Spanish universities presents a set of abilities and skills that are difficult to teach to students in higher and more technologically-oriented grades. In this paper, a teaching intervention that is based on design methodologies is proposed, to upgrade the competitive capacities of computer engineering students. In particular, this intervention targets those aspects relating to working in multidisciplinary teams and to defining requirements based on the user’s empathy and knowledge. The main idea inspiring this technique is that the underlying challenge is a communication problem. As Brooks (1995) states in his book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, even a project having all of the prerequisites for success (a clear mission, manpower, materials, time and adequate technology) could fail as a Tower of Babel. The proposed technique through mixed methods has been evaluated with students enrolled in different courses, confirming the repeatability and validity of this method from quantitative measurement, from observation of the results, and from ascertaining the value perceived by students and their attitudes.     

Research in technology education: looking back to move forward … again

In 2013 I published, in this Journal, a review of journals and conference publications in Technology Education from 2006 to 2010 as one measure of the nature of research that was being conducted in the area (Williams in Int J Technol Des Educ 23(1):1–9, 2013). An element of that review was a prediction of trends, from the findings, to speculate about what research areas may develop and become more significant and more common in the future. This prediction was integrated with personal experiences and understandings to result in a speculative discussion of future trends. This Research Note represents an extended review, both in terms of the journals and conferences covered, and the time period to include 2011–2013, in order to evaluate those predictions and refine possible future trends, and to answer the research question: What are the developments and trends in Technology Education research? It is hoped that this will be useful to researchers in the area of Technology Education who are planning research, and to stimulate discussion about the research that is needed in this area.     

What determines the performance of strategic alliance managers? Two lens model studies

Given the increasingly frequent call—often from macro, strategy researchers—for more micro-level probes into the drivers of strategic alliance performance, this article has responded to such a call by leveraging the organizational behavior (OB) and human resource (HR) literature on competencies. Based on two studies drawing on the lens model (Brunswik, 1954), we take on an important but little explored question: “What determines the performance of strategic alliance managers?” In Study 1 (a laboratory study), double system policy capturing results show a positive relationship between alliance competencies and performance judgments. In Study 2 (a field study), we investigate the evaluative behavior of alliance supervisors. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) results suggest that some structural, functional, and social competencies are evaluated as more important than other competencies in determining alliance managers’ performance.     

Discounting Indices Proposed for Capital Investment Evaluation: A Further Examination

A recent publication [2 Bernhard , Richard H. , “ A Comprehensive Comparison and Critique of Discounting Indices Proposed for Capital Investment Evaluation ,” The Engineering Economist , Volume 16 , Number 3 , Spring 1971 .[Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]] in this journal presented a comprehensive comparison and critique of discounting indices proposed for (i) the examination of whether a proposed independent project should be accepted and (ii) selection of a project from a set of mutually exclusive projects. The present paper examines procedures available in the literature of engineering and managerial economics and in practice for selecting projects from a given number of proposed capital investment projects, if a given capital constraint does not permit the undertaking of all proposed projects. It appears that the present state of the art is subject to much controversy and confusion. The ensuing presentation intends to rectify this situation. In addition, a procedure for the above selection problem is developed. Usage of this procedure is recommended for the many policy makers who are continually faced with the trade-off between elaborate methods on the one hand and cursory /approximations on the other.     

A pedagogic approach to enhance creative <Emphasis Type="Italic">Ideation</Emphasis> in classroom practice

The real intent for technology education is to prepare young people so that they may fully participate and function in human society. To achieve this aim, learners are guided towards the development of attributes that include perceptive, critical, creative and informed decision making. Although effective teaching strives to inspire the creative spark in every learner, there is little guidance to inform actual classroom practice. The selection of strategies and implementation methods that engender creative responses in students, is usually left to an individual teacher’s interpretation. A working knowledge of design processing provides a most advantageous methodology to guide teaching and learning as students develop ways “of knowing through thinking and doing,” Sharma and Poole (Des Manag Inst 20(4):64–74, 2010) within classroom design and technological practice. This article looks at the broad stage of Ideation in creative design practice, where designers instigate and generate ideas within their own practice. Insight and transferable skills are observed to inform classroom practice. One event from the ideation stage of design practice processing is selected to enhance student visual communication skills. A pedagogic approach is then shared to inform the implimentation of a teaching and learning strategy that has been trialled with design (aged from 12 to 18 years) and Initial Teacher Education adult students.