Enhancing Work-Readiness Through Scaffolding and Cognitive Transfer in CAD Education: A Twelve-Year Reflective Case Study

Engineering computer graphics education frequently exhibits a gap between procedural CAD software (e.g., CATIA 2022) training and the strategic engineering reasoning required by industrial practice. This paper documents a holistic redesign of two advanced CAD courses. The study is framed within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) tradition as a practitioner-led reflective case study. The redesign integrates four pedagogical mechanisms within an enterprise-CAD context: authentic problem-based learning, dual-layered asynchronous video scaffolding, software-agnostic heuristics (including pre-modelling cognitive mapping), and cognitive apprenticeship. The analysis triangulates three institutional data sources: quantitative Course Experience Survey indicators, qualitative student response themes, and twelve consecutive years of cohort-level academic performance records (2013–2024). The 2022 intervention iteration coincided with a marked elevation in academic performance. Grades reached approximately two standard deviations above the historical baseline. Concurrently, qualitative themes highlighted perceived industrial relevance and platform-portable confidence. However, performance in the post-intervention iterations (2023 and 2024) partially regressed. While scores remained above the historical mean, they did not sustain the 2022 peak. This pattern indicates partial sustainment, rather than evidence of a stable or definitive sustained pedagogical effect. This case is reported as descriptive rather than inferential. While the observed patterns align strongly with theoretical predictions, they do not establish definitive causal effects. Ultimately, the primary contribution of this study lies in documenting the integrated operationalization of these four mechanisms. Furthermore, it highlights longitudinal pedagogical sustainability as a critical, under-examined dimension that single-iteration evidence systematically obscures.