skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Examining Middle School Students’ Engineering Design Processes in a Design Workshop
Design thinking has an important role in STEM education. However, there has been limited research on how students engage in various modalities throughout the design process in hands-on design tasks. To promote middle school students’ engineering literacy, it is necessary to examine the use of design modalities during design. Using a case study approach, we examine middle school students’ design stages and modalities during design activities. We also identify the patterns of design processes in the teams with different design outcomes. Drawing on theories in design thinking and embodied interaction, we proposed a framework and devised a video analysis protocol to examine students’ design stages and modalities. Middle school students attending a design workshop engaged in two design activities in teams of 3–4 people. The design sessions were video recorded and analyzed using the video analysis protocol. The teams engaged in the stages of planning, building, and testing, while employing the verbal, the visual, and the physical modalities. The teams that varied in design outcomes exhibited different patterns in the use of multiple modalities during the design stages. This study contributes to research on design thinking by proposing a framework for analyzing middle school students’ multimodal design processes and presenting data visualization methods to identify patterns in design stages and modalities. The findings suggest the necessity to examine students’ use of design modalities in the context of design stages and imply the potential benefits of using multiple modalities during design. The implications for future research and education practices are also discussed.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1839971
PAR ID:
10128234
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Research in Science Education
ISSN:
0157-244X
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; (, International Journal of Art & Design Education)
    Abstract This experimental paper explores a form of neurodiversity‐affirming qualitative data analysis labelled a polyphony of (analytical) scores and creative methodologies utilised in our research project. Our data examples come from a federally funded research study which co‐designed sensory pedagogies for autistic students interested in computational thinking (CT). Four middle‐school teachers, or teacher fellows (TF), from diverse disciplines were recruited to develop neurodiverse CT mini curriculum and pedagogies for middle‐school students interested in STEM. Teacher fellows worked with the research team to co‐design teaching and learning materials and technology to explore computational thinking. The research team and teacher fellows attended workshops that included creative ensemble activities using digital‐physical musical technologies and CT concepts. Data from these workshops were used to create two polyphonic score compositions as ways to interact with data. A video creation addressed how TFs were impacted during the development and implementation of neurodiverse pedagogies. Quotes and keywords extracted for the video creation reflect how silence and sound collapse and expand in a rhizomatic fashion, indicating how TFs experience messiness, exploration, atypicality and more, which fully represent neurodiversity. The score analysis enabled us to diversify participants' experiences with neurodiverse pedagogies and illustrated the affective dimensions of musical composition as a form of data analysis. 
    more » « less
  2. ; (, International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education)
    Recent reforms in science education have supported the inclusion of engineering in K- 12 curricula. To this end, many science classrooms have incorporated engineering units that include design tasks. Design is an integral part of engineering and helps students think in creative and interdisciplinary ways. In this study, we examined middle-school students’ naturally occurring design conversations in small design teams and their learning of science as a result of engaging in an engineering and science unit. We found that the proportion of different thought processes used by boys and girls was quite similar. Both girls and boys produced a higher percentage of ideas or thoughts associated with divergent thinking, but a lower proportion in convergent thinking, evaluative thinking, and cognitive memory. In addition, gender composition of design teams influenced thought processes expressed by girls and boys. Interestingly, in mixed teams, both girls and boys expressed less divergent thinking than those in single-sex teams. With regard to science content learning, both girls and boys showed statistically significant learning gains. There were no significant gender differences in the pre- and post-test scores. These results suggest that participating in an engineering design task in small design teams provided students opportunities to engage in productive thinking and enhance their learning of the targeted science concept—ecosystems. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; (, Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER))
    STUDY CONTEXT: The overarching goal of this project is to address the disconnect between science, design, and technology (Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019). We examine how urban and rural high school students benefit from innovative learning experiences in plant science that integrate these disciplines while gaining interest in and skills for future STEM careers. This project tests a STEAM (Art in STEM) teaching model in which students create scientific products to incorporate in Augmented and Virtual Reality (AVR) platforms. This experience inspires creative learning, provides critical thinking and problem-solving benefits, supports concepts of innovation, and allows students to connect to real-life situations impacting their career paths. RESEARCH DESIGN: Objectives: 1. Inspire interest in STEM careers among students and provide them with skills for a future STEM career, 2. Foster knowledge and appreciation of plant science among students, 3. Integrate art/design into STEM plant science education, and 4. Apply AVR technology to advance in plant science education through the use of novel tools and methodologies. Teams of self-identified science, technophile, and art students receive training in 3D modeling. With support from scientists, they create models of plants under research at our institution, write worksheets, and give presentations in public/scientific events. Teams’ products will be shared globally through the education community of our AVR partner institution. To assess the project objectives, we are using a mixed-methods approach using pre/post open-ended self-reflections and surveys (STEM Semantics Survey with additional questions for A (Art/Design); Plant Awareness Disparity Index (PAD-I)). ANALYSES AND INTERPRETATION: Data collection is in its initial stages. We will present preliminary results from surveys and reflections from 28 students. The students worked in seven teams that created models of corn, alfalfa, volvox, and milkweed. CONTRIBUTION: This project contributes to STEAM, an emerging discipline with scant information on theory, best practices, and practical applications, by testing a teaching model in which students design and create scientific products. The project contributes to the body of knowledge on AVR teaching tools from a different approach by allowing the students to create their own AVR products. The project also contributes to interesting and challenging ways to learn about plant science and promote plant awareness. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, The 2022 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI'22: December 14-16, 2022; Las Vegas, USA)
    It is essential to initiate a curriculum concerning mobile device forensics and law enforcement in the intermediate grades in Mississippi using a facet of multidisciplinary subjects: biology, chemistry, computer science, criminology, and physics. The students participated in engaged teams who gathered the evidence (critical thinking), analyzed the evidence (deductive reasoning), and drew conclusions (inference) in a story-based scenario entitled “Cyberbullying Mobile Device Criminal Investigation.” This research presents cyberbullying while bringing awareness to the law enforcement community by understanding digital forensics; furthermore, it shows how STEM and Criminology are presented to intermediate students by solving a middle school mystery based on a multidisciplinary framework. By including a multidisciplinary curriculum in this process, students developed an appreciation of the interrelatedness between the STEM Sciences and Liberal Arts Education. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the Physics Education Research Conference)
    Frank, Brian W.; Jones, Dyan; Ryan, Qing X. (Ed.)
    With the growing ubiquity of computation in STEM fields, understanding how to teach computational thinking (CT) practices has become an active research area in the last two decades, with particular emphasis on developing CT frameworks. In this paper, we apply one of these CT frameworks and compare the results with a task analysis to examine how CT practices relate to specific design features of an in-class problem. We have analyzed video data from two separate groups working on one computational class period, which utilizes a minimally working program to model magnetic field vectors. While still in the initial stages of the study, our preliminary results indicate that what is left out of the minimally working program will impact the CT practices students use, particularly around building computational models. Ultimately, we hope this work will help instructors to design activities that can target & build specific CT practices. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email