Abstract
Engineering experts spend more cognitive effort on the whole and on subsystem interactions; novices dive depth-first into details with less breadth-first decomposition (Song & Becker, 2014).
Song, T., & Becker, K. (2014). Expert vs. novice: Problem decomposition/recomposition in engineering design. 2014 International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL), 181–190. DOI
Key findings
- Expert breadth-first: — Experts allocate more effort to the problem as a whole and to interactions between subsystems.
- Novice depth-first: — Students spend more effort on subsystem details with less decomposition/recomposition.
Application
When you reach for an automation tool while the weak link is still unnamed fog — open this cite for why experts decompose before they scale the tool.