An Analysis of Cognitive Artifacts on Pre-service Teachers' Engineering Design Activity: a Distributed Cognition Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyze the cognitive artifacts on pre-service teachers' engineering design activity from a distributed cognition perspective. For this study, a engineering design task was developed, which was evaluated by four science education experts. Data on production of external representation such as, verbal language, gestures, symbolic markings, diagrams, drawings were gathered as cognitive artifacts. Pre-service teachers created and used various types cognitive artifacts for communication, explanation, reasoning during a engineering design activity. These results clearly means that cognitive artifacts has a important role in the interaction between actors thereby, science class also need to be analyzed on distributed cognition perspective including variable cognitive artifacts.