Design education has moved towards a collaborative practice where designers work in teams and with other disciplines to solve unstructured problems. Along with the cognitive skills involved in the execution of the design process, designers also need skills to work in teams, share information, negotiate common ground and reach consensus.…

Design and design thinking are increasingly being taught across several disciplines--ranging from arts, architecture, and technology and engineering to business schools--where expertise plays a central role. A substantial corpus of literature on research in regard to design expert and design expertise has accumulated in the last decades. However,…

When a course designed around cooperative, problem-centered instruction attracts learners with a wide range of experience in the topic, should learners be grouped heterogeneously or homogeneously in terms of their relative expertise? In this study, learners were randomly distributed between the two types of groups; learning gains, satisfaction,…

In this study, the authors used two methods for analyzing expert data: verbal protocol analysis (VPA) and narrative analysis. VPA has been effectively used to describe the design processes employed by engineering students, expert designers, and expert-novice comparative research. VPA involves asking participants to "think aloud" while…