The Four-Domain Development Diagram: A Guide for Holistic Design of Effective Learning Experiences for the Twenty-first Century Engineer

The twenty-first century challenges engineering educators to design learning experiences to strategically and holistically target students’ development, including cognitive, psychomotor, social and affective domains. We propose a guide for the design process. The Four-Domain Development Diagram (4DDD) is a synthesis of learning theory and empirical data. This guide maps the relationships among the major factors that influence learning and presents them in the form of a causal loop diagram, a tool used by systems dynamicists to show how changes in important factors affect other factors within the system. In this paper, we present the theoretical and empirical basis of the 4DDD. We also describe how the 4DDD can be used as a design guide for instructional changes that promote more effective learning experiences for the broader cognitive, social, affective, and psychomotor development required of today’s engineering graduate.