The Effectiveness Analysis of Public Education and Health Expenditures

Abstract. This study examines the links between public education and health expenditures, and education and health outcomes- measured by the school life expactancy and rate of child (under five) mortality, life expactancy at birth. It also investigates the role of governance on the effectiveness of public education and health expenditures. The effectiveness of public education and health expenditures is examined within education and health production function by using 2002- 2012 data. Empirical results show that effects of socioeconomic and environmental factors and demographic structure on education and health outcomes are similar to those in previous studies. The results indicate two important findings. First, public education and health expenditures remain incapable to explain outcomes when compared to other socioeconomic variables. Second, increase in public education and health expenditures is associated with improved outcomes just in countries where regulatory quality and control of corruption is high. With a general expression, public education and health expenditures become more effective in countries with high governance level.Keywords. Public education expenditures, Public health expenditures, Child mortality rate, Life expactancy at birth, School life expactancy.JEL. I18, I28, H51, H52

Influences of feedback interventions on student concept generation and development practices

Design teaching in many disciplines relies on feedback as a primary way for students and instructors to communicate. Our work focused on identifying feedback types in three different design disciplines (dance choreography, industrial design, and mechanical engineering) and analyzing how those feedback types encouraged students to take convergent or divergent paths with their design ideas. We then compared feedback types and encouragement of convergence or divergence across the three disciplines. Our findings showed many common types of feedback used across the three disciplines, regardless of variance in context and expectations. However, the findings also revealed a high frequency of feedback suggesting convergence or not pushing in either direction. While design processes aim to identify the most promising solution through a series of convergence steps, divergence is equally critical throughout the entire process, and this work suggests a consideration of when and how to integrate feedback supporting divergence throughout design processes

Directing Convergent and Divergent Activity through Design Feedback.

Design education across design disciplines prioritizes project-based courses to support student learning about design processes and strategies (Eastman, Newstetter, & McCracken, 1999; Smith, Sheppard, Johnson, & Johnson, 2005). Success in teaching these courses relies on the ability of instructors to mentor and guide students\u27 design paths, allowing students some freedom to determine design decisions on their own, while facilitating a structure where they can learn successful design strategies

A Case-Study Analysis of Design Heuristics in an Upper-Level Cross-Disciplinary Design Course

A Case-Study Analysis of Design Heuristics in an Upper-Level Cross-Disciplinary Design CourseDesign Heuristics is a design ideation tool drawn from empirical evidence including observationsof professional designers and analyses of award-winning products. Design Heuristics cardsprovide strategies for generating alternative designs during concept ideation. The motivation forthis research study was to investigate how Design Heuristics were utilized by novice designersworking in cross-disciplinary teams. We were interested in exploring the practical elementssupported by heuristic use and the degree to which heuristic use made an impact throughout thedesign processes of cross-disciplinary design teams. In our investigation, we also saw successesand challenges in the teams’ design processes, including patterns in the way team membersdeveloped, transferred, and synthesized their concepts. These patterns highlight importantfeatures of successful team concept generation and development.Using a case-study framework, we followed the design processes of eight cross-disciplinarystudent design teams enrolled in a semester-long upper-level design course. The teamsindividually chose their design projects based on their interests and preliminary research. In aclass session at the beginning of the term, the teams were taught how to use the DesignHeuristics cards, and were then asked to use the cards in the preliminary concept generationphase of their design projects. We collected copies of these preliminary concepts, and continuedto collect data in the form of reports throughout the semester at the Proposal milestone, theProgress Report milestone, and the Final Report milestone of the course. Using the data collectedat these three stages, we created “timelines” detailing each team’s progression through the designprocess. We analyzed these timelines for evidence of heuristic use that was present in the initialconcepts and carried through the design process to the final design. In performing this analysis,we also noticed patterns in the synthesis of concepts at various phases in the design process. Wealso saw how the teams transferred ideas when moving from one design process phase toanother.Our analysis revealed that all eight teams showed strong evidence of heuristic use in their latterdesigns following their initial heuristic-driven ideation session. Of these, seven teams showedstrong evidence of heuristic use in their final designs and prototypes. Because all eight teamsstudied were working on different design problems, our results demonstrate that heuristics workeffectively across different design contexts. This suggests that the Design Heuristics cardssupport practicality in a variety of design contexts and that heuristics can be utilized by novicedesigners and design teams to generate innovative solutions to a range of design problems.Our analysis also uncovered patterns in the way the teams progressed with their ideas throughthe design process. Seven of the eight teams studied showed evidence of concept synthesis intheir design processes. All eight teams showed evidence of direct transfer between designprocess phases at some point, meaning that they took their ideas, concepts, or prototypes fromone phase of the design process and transferred them directly and without abstraction to anotherphase. Only three teams showed evidence of transformation between design process phases atsome point, meaning that they displayed some abstraction when moving their ideas, concepts, orprototypes from one phase to another. These findings suggest opportunities for further researchand exploration of Design Heuristics and team concept development processes

How do designers generate new ideas? Design heuristics across two disciplines

Research supports the central role cognitive strategies can play in successful concept generation by individual designers. Design heuristics have been shown to facilitate the creation of new design concepts in the early, conceptual stage of the design process, as well as throughout the development of ideas. However, we know relatively little about their use in differing disciplines. This study examined evidence of design heuristic use in a protocol study with 12 mechanical engineers and 12 industrial designers who worked individually to develop multiple concepts. The open-ended design problem was for a novel product, and the designers’ sketches and comments were recorded as they worked on the problem for 25 min and in a retrospective interview. The results showed frequent use of design heuristics in both disciplines and a significant relationship to the rated creativity of the concepts. Though industrial designers used more heuristics in their concepts, there was a high degree of similarity in heuristic use. Some differences between design disciplines were observed in the choice of design heuristics, where industrial designers showed a greater emphasis on user experience, environmental contexts, and added features. These findings demonstrate the prevalence of design heuristics in individual concept generation and their effectiveness in generating creative concepts, across two design domains

Comparison of design Approaches between Engineers and Industrial Designers

Design Heuristics are an idea generation tool based on empirical evidence from successful designs. The heuristics serve as cognitive “shortcuts” that encourage exploration of novel directions during concept generation. Design Heuristics were identified from an analysis of hundreds of innovative products and from studies of expert engineering and industrial designers. The research reported in this paper examines the utility of Design Heuristics instruction in two different classroom settings with engineering and industrial design students. The aim was to test whether design heuristics can play a useful role in creating new designs and overcoming fixations in the design process. Twenty novice industrial design students and forty-eight novice engineering students were given a short design task along with a set of twelve Design Heuristics. The heuristics were illustrated on cards describing their use and two example images of products using each heuristic. The students participated in a short instructional session on the use of heuristics, and were asked to generate concepts for a given problem. The results showed that the Design Heuristics helped the students to generate more diverse candidate concepts, and that the concepts they produced were creative and complex. Students sometimes applied multiple heuristics within a single design, leading to more complex and well-developed solutions

Investigating the Impacts of Design Heuristics on Idea Initiation and Development

This paper presents an analysis of engineering students’ use of Design Heuristics as part of a team project in an undergraduate engineering design course. Design Heuristics are an empirically derived set of cognitive “rules of thumb” for use in concept generation. We investigated heuristic use in the initial concept generation phase, whether heuristic-inspired concepts were carried through to later design process stages, and how concept synthesis within each team’s design process related to heuristic use. The results reveal widespread use of Design Heuristics among the concepts generated by individuals and selected by teams for further development, and a prevalence of concept synthesis within approximately half of the observed teams’ design processes

Expanding Evidence-based Pedagogy with Design Heuristics

Expanding Evidence-based Pedagogy with Design Heuristics Creative thinking during concept generation has been identified as a key source of successful innovations; thus, techniques to support creative conceptual design are imperative in engineering education. However, teaching students to “think in novatively” has been difficult for many educators, often because of a lack of effective instructional methods. While a variety of methods for concept generation have been published, only one method has been systematically derived from observing engineers during design creation and empirically validated in scientific studies:Design Heuristics. In empirical studies, Design Heuristics have been successfully tested in engineering and design classrooms, have been readily adopted by students, and have been shown to result in more creative, and more diverse, concepts.The focus of this project is to create a set of lessons for engineering students based on empirically-validated Design Heuristics that can be incorporated directly into existing undergraduate courses. The project is designed to refine these pedagogical methods through co-creation of lessons with engineering instructors from diverse institutions and backgrounds. Our goals include: 1) raise awareness of the importance of teaching students to generate creative concepts; 2) educate instructors on how to teach Design Heuristics within existing engineering classes; 3) assess learning outcomes from Design Heuristics pedagogy from diverse instructors,courses, and universities; and 4) incorporate the lessons learned to develop an effective, easy-to-adopt pedagogy for educating students about how to generate creative ideas.In this paper, we focus on a sustainable foundation for our development of design pedagogy for transforming undergraduate education in engineering. We present our progress and vision for this foundation, and illustrate some instructional lessons that have emerged from our work

Teaching Design Ideation

Teaching Design IdeationAbstractA continuous challenge for engineering students is to generate creative designs. Many times,creative outcomes can be traced to idea generation; however, engineering students struggle togenerate multiple ideas (Cross, 2001) and become attached to first ideas, even when they realizethose ideas have serious flaws or challenges (Ball et al., 1994; Rowe, 1987; Ullman et al., 1988).Even when students suggest creative ideas, they do not use a specific strategy that can help themexplore the larger potential solution space, limiting their ability to suggest alternative creativesolutions.The challenge for engineering educators, on the other hand, is how to teach students creativity inengineering design courses. Based on advanced student and practitioner data from engineeringand industrial design, we developed design strategies to support diverse and creative conceptsduring initial idea generation for the design of products. We call these strategies “designheuristics,” because, once integrated into a designer’s ideation process, they serve as cognitiveshortcuts for creative, multiple, and diverse idea generation.In this study, we provided a brief educational session about the design heuristics toapproximately 100 students in an introductory engineering course, and analyzed their designconcepts as a result of heuristic use. This paper demonstrates example outcomes of thoseconcepts, along with a discussion of the creativity and diversity of their ideas, and a comparisonto some example concepts for the same design problem that were generated without the use ofheuristics