This study investigates pedagogical strategies of how cognitive aspects of design thinking can be a subject of design education particularly in the first year design education. It focuses on design reasoning and on its two distinct forms as associative and rule-based reasoning. An experimental study composed of three different experiments is conducted to investigate the impact of using certain reasoning strategies on first year design students’ creative performance. First experiment indicates that those students who were not directed to use either of the two forms of reasoning performed better. When students are asked to use a specific reasoning strategy in solving a design problem, this might increase students’ cognitive load which in turn encumber their creative performance. The second experiment provides insights into the order in which these forms of reasoning can be introduced to students in design studio education. The results indicate that when students first conduct a free exploration of the given design problem before being asked to use one of the reasoning strategies their creative performance is better. It is proposed that familiarization with a given problem freely prepares students for a structured design exploration through either rule-based or associative reasoning strategy. The third experiment investigates the impact of a specially designed instruction to use one of the reasoning strategies. When students are provided with an explicit instruction giving information on two forms of reasoning strategies and their use in design before exploring the design problem on their own, the results demonstrated the utility of providing specific information on these reasoning strategies particularly for associative reasoning strategies. The findings suggest that a dual process approach to design education could be beneficial in developing pedagogical strategies for design learning.