A study of the impact of the willingness-to-learn of CAD novice users on their competence development

Abstract

The notion that 'attitude drives behavior' manifests itself in a variety of ways in educational and occupational settings. As applied to CAD competence development, industrial training of novice CAD users on their way to becoming competent CAD users consume a lot of corporate resources. This paper is the third paper in the line of research that attempts to answer the question having to do with what it takes to make a competent CAD user. Specifically, we examine the CAD-specific factors revolving around the trainees' willingness-to-learn CAD. These factors are analyzed in two stages. At the start of the training, trainees' initial attitude towards CAD is established by means of a short questionnaire. Afterwards, throughout the training, trainees' behavior (online and offline practice) is gauged and, in turn, a relation is established to illustrate how this practice leads to the development of CAD-specific skills. For this purpose, another short questionnaire was utilized. Strong correlations were established relating the trainees' CAD-specific behavior with the CAD-specific outcomes of learning CAD syntax. Furthermore, and in order to assess the quality of the trainees' learning of CAD, overall competence was monitored throughout the study via performance measures that describe the time it took the trainees to build test models (speed), which reflects upon the ability to learn the syntax of the CAD tool (declarative knowledge). The sophistication of the models is also used as another measure. Correlating the trainees' character attributes with these assessed measures, it was found that the stronger is the trainees' will to learn CAD, the stronger is the likelihood to learn faster. Perhaps more importantly, trainees with initial favorable attitude toward CAD were shown to develop increasingly positive behavior that manifested through additional practice and other forms of visible effort. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.