Cognitive flexibility is crucial for innovative thinking and creativity before acting and making decisions. Students reconstruct the framework of their cognitive reality according to their concepts and behave accordingly. Cognitive concepts can occasionally lead to adopting various emotions and behaviors associated with a flexible approach to understanding others' perspectives. Cognitive flexibility is characterized by knowing potential alternatives for addressing a situation, and the student's willingness to adapt and embrace diverse ideas and perspectives in novel circumstances. Students exhibiting cognitive flexibility are open to exploring novel methods of cognitive connection with others and have confidence. Thus, this mixed method study investigated the three-step teaching model—design, build, and test—that lends a hand to students to become more cognitively flexible while solving engineering problems in physics classes. The study was conducted empirically, including an experiment group that was instructed with the design-build-test model, while a control group was taught conventionally. The study sample comprised 116 tenth-grade students, including males and females. The cognitive flexibility scale (Martin & Anderson, 2007), modified for the Omani setting was used for data gathering, which underwent statistical analysis utilizing One-way ANOVA. The findings revealed that students in the experimental group surpassed those in the control group in cognitive flexibility firmness, in addition, male students excelled over females within the experimental group. Qualitative classroom observation was used to triangulate quantitative data. The study advocates fostering cognitive flexibility through activities that promote its development, including the engineering design process.

Authors:
Salim Alharmali, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman

About the Presenter(s)
MR. Salim alharmali currently is a PhD scholar at sultan Qaboos University, his research project is about engineering design process among 10th-grade student. This purpose of this project is connected to how could we engineer physics curricula.

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Salim-Alharmali

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