Recently there have been calls to integrate engineering design experiences to support students’ scientific understanding. There is a need for instructional strategies in which learners are encouraged to identify and reflect on ways scientific principles can be applied to inform their designs and evaluate alternative designs. Studies show that the inclusion of contrasting cases can improve students’ conceptual understanding and reasoning. Yet, such tasks depend on how they are scaffolded. In this study, pre-service elementary teachers in a conceptual physics course analyzed contrasting solutions to a design problem. Two forms of scaffolds were embedded to facilitate case evaluation: 1) identify similarities and differences and 2) evaluate and produce an argument for a “good” design solution. We investigated the scientific ideas that the participants used as they contrasted multiple design solutions and the impact of the two approaches in students’ understanding of heat transfer. We found no significant differences in students’ conceptual understanding, but the argumentation condition had a significantly larger number of scientific ideas ‘cited’, ‘explained’ or ‘applied’ in their solutions,. The results suggest that contrasting designs with argumentation may be a promising intervention to facilitate students to use science concepts in engineering design. Future work is needed in order to investigate better scaffolds that can help students’ increase in conceptual learning.
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Scaffolding Evidence-Based Reasoning in a Technology Supported Engineering Design Activity
Engineering Design (ED) challenges are increasingly used as a context to learn science. Research shows that there is a need for strategies that facilitate learners to identify, apply, and reflect on ways scientific principles can inform creation and evaluation of ED solutions. We investigate the use of contrasting cases and argumentation scaffolds to facilitate use of evidence-based reasoning in a CAD supported ED tasks. Elementary education majors in a physics course analyzed solutions to an ED problem in two conditions: 1) identify similarities and differences, 2) evaluate and produce an argument for a “good” design solution. We found that the argumentation condition used scientific evidence-based reasoning significantly more frequently in their responses than the control. Results indicate that the contrasting cases with argumentation scaffolds shows promise in facilitating students’ use of evidence-based reasoning in their ED tasks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1712201
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10105929
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The 13th Conference of the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Recently there have been calls to integrate engineering design experiences to support students’ scientific understanding. There is a need for instructional strategies in which learners are encouraged to identify and reflect on ways scientific principles can be applied to inform their designs and evaluate alternative designs. Studies show that the inclusion of contrasting cases can improve students’ conceptual understanding and reasoning. Yet, such tasks depend on how they are scaffolded. In this study, pre-service elementary teachers in a conceptual physics course analyzed contrasting solutions to a design problem. Two forms of scaffolds were embedded to facilitate case evaluation: 1) identify similarities and differences and 2) evaluate and produce an argument for a “good” design solution. We investigated the scientific ideas that the participants used as they contrasted multiple design solutions and the impact of the two approaches in students’ understanding of heat transfer. We found no significant differences in students’ conceptual understanding, but the argumentation condition had a significantly larger number of scientific ideas ‘cited’, ‘explained’ or ‘applied’ in their solutions,. The results suggest that contrasting designs with argumentation may be a promising intervention to facilitate students to use science concepts in engineering design. Future work is needed in order to investigate better scaffolds that can help students’ increase in conceptual learning.more » « less
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Prior studies have revealed that both contrasting cases and argumentation tasks can support deeper learning and problem solving skills. Yet, these studies suggest that appropriate scaffolds are need for these instructional strategies to be successful. We investigate alternative forms of writing prompts (similarities and differences, invent a unify statement, and argumentation) for two cases that addresses the momentum principle. Results suggest that prompts for identifying similarities and differences within cases tended to promote identification of surface features irrelevant to solving the problems. However, argumentation prompts to evaluate competing theories tended to support deeper understanding of underlying principles and appropriate application of principles.more » « less
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Logic programs (LPs) and argumentation frameworks (AFs) are two declarative knowledge representation (KR) formalisms used for different reasoning tasks. The purpose of this study is interlinking two different reasoning components. To this end, we introduce two frameworks: LPAF and AFLP. The former enables to use the result of argumentation in AF for reasoning in LP, while the latter enables to use the result of reasoning in LP for arguing in AF. These frameworks are extended to bidirectional frameworks in which AF and LP can exchange information with each other. We also investigate their connection to several general KR frameworks from the literature.more » « less
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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