CAREER: Enhancing Situated Cognition in Product Design and Manufacturing Education through Visual Experiential Learning

Manufacturing serves as a fundamental pillar of America's economic resilience and national security, exerting a critical influence across nearly every sector of the U.S. economy. To address global competition and maintain a leading role, it is essential to develop, scale, and promote the advanced manufacturing workforce by integrating advanced manufacturing into STEM education and expanding the use of emerging learning technologies and practices. As a central and strategic element of the manufacturing sector, Product Design and Manufacturing (PD&M) adds high value by bridging creative design with practical manufacturing. Proficiency in PD&M demands not only technical knowledge but also intuitive judgment shaped by extensive practical experience, sophisticated decision-making abilities, and strong adaptability to novel and unpredictable challenges. As such, human involvement remains crucial and irreplaceable in PD&M. Current educational approaches have proven insufficient in adequately preparing students for these cognitive-demanding roles. The path to these demanding manufacturing roles can be non-traditional and thus it is essential to study the construction of knowledge so that alternate educational pathways can be developed. This study aims to understand cognition of learning in an applied experiential learning environment and there is potential for the knowledge gains to impact other critical areas of STEM workforce development. The primary objective of this research is to gain a fundamental understanding of situated cognition and embodied cognition within manufacturing contexts and specifically PD&M. Understanding cognition of learning within specific work-related situations will enable us to improve knowledge acquisition towards workforce preparation. An investigation of pedagogical strategies that facilitate effective experiential knowledge acquisition specific to PD&M will also be investigated. The integration of research-informed situated cognition towards experiential learning methodologies in manufacturing education programs will foster professional-level competencies and intuitive insights among the next-generation manufacturing workforce. By collaborating with two-year Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs), K-12 educational services, and industry partners, the project will leverage the manufacturing workforce preparation and augmentation by modernizing the learning experiences of these manufacturing professionals across various educational levels. To complement the research plan, an education plan will target educational activities that will reach multiple audiences of university students, community college students, and high school students. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-wide activity that supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. This CAREER project is supported by NSF's Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program and the Education Core Research (ECR) STEM Education (EDU) program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.