| Summary: | This thesis is an effort to determine the characteristics of expertise by studying tutorial interactions within the architectural studio environment. The aim is to establish if expert tutors and novice students employ different cognitive actions and strategies in dealing with emerging design 'situations' during tutorial conversations. This is a challenging prospect since the design tutorial is a confluence of activities generated by participants who possess disparate levels of design abilities. To analyse and compare cognitive actions and strategies quantitatively, verbal protocol texts obtained from twelve tutorial interactions were parsed into discreet segments of cognitive actions and their accompanying attributes. What is crucial here is that every cognitive action carries a set of crucial information that has bearing on the cognitive strategies used by tutors and students during tutorial conversations. Cognitive actions like formulate, evaluate and move actions serve as a primary category in encoding verbal segments since these appear to be the most explicit and common communicative propositions observed in these tutorials. In addition, various other categories of information attributes such as cognitive organisation, domain knowledge and type oftransformation are then assigned to these cognitive actions. Through such a scheme, cognitive actions and their designated information attributes could be systematically analysed in terms of frequency and duration. From the study, we found that the degree of differences in Cognitive activities between tutors and students corresponded to the way they comprehended problems, formulated 'emerging' situations and prescribed moves in order to advance design activities. By comparing situated cognitive activities in tutorial conversations, we hope to add a richer and more practical description of design expertise. One of the key contributions from this study would be to encourage deliberate and effective development and management of expertise in designers.
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