The profound integration of artificial intelligence technology is propelling the transformation of civil engineering education from large-scale provision to precise talent cultivation. The core challenge lies in how to realize a significant leap in students’ engineering cognitive levels through teaching innovation. This research integrates Boyer’s multi-dimensional academic perspective and Bloom’s cognitive objective classification theory to construct a theoretical analysis framework of “cognitive integration - hierarchical leap”, defining the goal dimensions of cognitive development with Boyer’s four-dimensional academic ability and the ladder path of leap with Bloom’s cognitive hierarchy. The two are connected and coordinated at the operational level through “contextualized teaching design”, thereby clarifying the internal logic of the reconstruction of talent cultivation models empowered by digital intelligence. Based on the teaching reform exploration and practice of the civil engineering major at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, the study compares the achievement of 12 graduation requirements of undergraduate students in 2016, 2018 and 2020, and conducts a process-based assessment with the exploratory cognitive development quantification index (CDI). The study reveals that digital intelligence courses are one of the crucial driving factors promoting the development of students’ innovative design capabilities. The full realization of their enabling effect is highly dependent on whether the teaching mechanism can effectively guide students to leap from low-level cognition of mechanical memory and procedural application to high-level cognition of complex problem-solving and critical thinking. Based on this, the study further analyzes the occurrence conditions and action mechanisms of cognitive leap, and then proposes a “five-in-one” systematic reform path oriented to cognitive level reconstruction, providing a reference model with both theoretical depth and practical validity for civil engineering majors to cope with the challenges of the digital intelligence era.