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1. Characterizing student argument justifications in small group sociotechnical discussions

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--43187  

   Andrews, Chelsea; Rahman, Fatima (June 2023, Annual ASEE Conference and Exhibition)

   There have been increased calls to include sociotechnical thinking–grappling with issues of power, history, and culture–throughout the undergraduate engineering curriculum. One way this more expansive framing of engineering has been integrated into engineering courses is through in-class discussions. There is a need to understand what students are attending to in these conversations. In particular, we are interested in how students frame and justify their arguments in small-group discussions. This study is part of an NSF-funded research project to implement and study integrating sociotechnical components throughout a first-year computing for engineers course. In one iteration of the revised course, each week students read a news article on a current example of the uneven impacts of technology, then engaged in in-class small-group discussions. In this study, we analyze students’ discourse to answer the research questions: What arguments do students use to argue against the use of a technology? How do these arguments relate to common narratives about technology? In this qualitative case study, we analyzed videorecordings of the small group discussions of two focus groups discussing the use of AI in hiring. We looked closely at the justifications students gave for their stated positions and how they relate to the common narratives of technocracy, free market idealism, technological neutrality, and technological determinism. We found all students in both groups rejected these common narratives. We saw students argue that (1) AI technology does not solve the hiring problem well, (2) it is important to regulate AI, (3) using AI for hiring will stagnate diversity, and (4) using AI for hiring unfairly privileges some groups of people over others. While students in both groups rejected the common narratives, only one group explicitly centered those who are harmed and how this harm would likely occur, and this group did so consistently. The other group managed to consistently reject the narratives using vague, safe language and never explicitly mentioned who is harmed by the technology. As a result, only one group’s discussion was clearly centered on justice concerns. These results have implications for how to scaffold small group sociotechnical discussions, what instructors should attend to during these discussions, and how to support students to orient toward systemic impacts and sustain a focus on justice. 

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2. Designing for Framing in Online Teacher Education: Supporting Teachers’ Attending to Student Thinking in Video Discussions of Classroom Engineering

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00224871211056577  

   Watkins, Jessica; Portsmore, Merredith (November 2021, Journal of Teacher Education)

   Participating in discussions of classroom video can support teachers to attend to student thinking. Central to the success of these discussions is how teachers interpret the activity they are engaged in—how teachersframewhat they are doing. In asynchronous online environments, negotiating framing poses challenges, given that interactions are not in real time and often require written text. We present findings from an online course designed to support teachers to frame video discussions as making sense of student thinking. In an engineering pedagogy course designed to emphasize responsiveness to students’ thinking, we documented shifts in teachers’ framing, with teachers more frequently making sense of, rather than evaluating, student thinking later in the course. These findings show that it is possible to design an asynchronous online course to productively engage teachers in video discussions and inform theory development in online teacher education. 

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3. Teachers’ Perspectives on Facilitating Design Talks with Young Learners (Fundamental)

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--57188  

   Andrews, Chelsea; Watkins, Jessica; Wendell, Kristen; Woodcock, Rae; Rausch, Shannon; Gor, Vera; Fox, Naina; Bandi, Rachel; Malinowski, Molly (June 2025, ASEE Conferences)

   There is a growing body of work to characterize elementary engineering classroom talk and its influence on students’ learning. One form of classroom talk is the whole-class conversation, which can be an important site for growth in students’ ideas and ways of thinking about engineering design problems and solutions. With intentional teacher facilitation, whole-class conversations can help students refine their engineering reasoning, consider new ideas, and make new connections between different ways of defining or solving a problem. Participating in these conversations can also help students expand their engineering thinking to include perspectives of care and socio-ethical deliberations. In a multi-year collaboration of classroom teachers and university researchers, we have been enacting and studying five different genres of whole-class engineering Design Talks in first-grade through sixth-grade classrooms: problem scoping talks, idea generation talks, design-in-progress talks, design synthesis talks, and impact talks. As a teacher-researcher community of practice, we have video recorded these “Design Talks” in teachers’ classrooms. These classroom video clips have helped us explore a range of questions about how to structure Design Talks. This paper reports on a qualitative study focused on teacher perceptions of their experiences with Design Talks in their classrooms. Specifically, we ask: How do elementary teachers perceive the benefits and challenges of intentionally facilitated whole-class conversations during engineering design units? Study participants were the six classroom teachers in our Design Talks community of practice. Data sources include field notes from teacher-researcher meetings over three years and teachers’ written responses to open-ended reflection questions. We applied thematic analysis techniques (Braun & Clarke, 2006), including initial coding followed by thematic mapping. We found four themes that characterize how teachers perceive the benefits and challenges of whole-class engineering design conversations. Teachers find that these conversations help them employ asset-based pedagogies while at the same time helping their students synthesize designs and their underlying concepts, take a perspective of care in engineering design, and learn to listen, empathize, and communicate. 

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4. A balancing act: Elementary teachers and their students balancing tradeoffs in engineering design projects

   Johnson, Matthew M.; Gil, Minyoung (August 2022, ASEE annual conference proceedings)

   This fundamental research in pre-college education engineering study investigates the ways in which elementary school students and their teacher balance the tradeoffs in engineering design. STEM education reforms promote the engagement of K-12 students in the epistemic practices of disciplinary experts to teach content.1,2,3 This emphasis on practices is a paradigm shift that requires both extensive professional development and research to learn about the ways in which students and teacher learn about and participate in these practices. Balancing tradeoffs is an important practice in engineering but most often in classroom curricula it is embedded in the concept of iteration1,4; however, improving a design is not always the same as balancing trade-offs.1 Optimizing a multivariate problem requires students to engage in a number of engineering practices, like considering multiple solution, making tradeoffs between criteria and constraints, applying math and science knowledge to problem solving, constructing models, making evidence-based decisions, and assessing the implications of solutions5. The ways in which teachers and students collectively balance these tradeoffs in a design has been understudied1. Our primary research questions are, “How do teachers and students make decisions about making tradeoffs between criteria and constraints” and “How do experiences in teacher workshops affect the ways they implement engineering projects in their classes.” We take an ethnographic perspective to investigate these phenomena, and collected video data, field notes, student journals, and semi-structured interviews of eight elementary teachers in a workshop and similar data from two of the workshop teachers’ classes as they implemented the curriculum they learned in the workshop. Our analyses focus on the disciplinary practices teachers and students use to make decisions for balancing tradeoffs, how they are supported (or impeded) by teachers, and how they justify these decisions. Similarly, we compared two of the teachers wearing their “student hat” in the workshop as well as their “teacher hat” in the classroom5. Our analyses suggest three significant findings. First, teachers and students tended to focus on one criterion (e.g. cost, performance) and had few discussions about trying to minimize cost and maximize performance. Second, curriculum design significantly impacts the choices students make. Using two examples, we will show the impact of weighting criteria differently on the design strategies teachers and students make. Last, we noted most of the feedback given was related to managing classroom activity rather than supporting students’ designs. Implications of this study are relevant to both engineering educators and engineering curriculum developers. 

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5. Using Traffic Stops to Engage Preservice Teachers in Thinking About Systemic Racism

   https://doi.org/10.5951/MTE.2023-0029  

   Fernandes, Anthony; Simic-Muller, Ksenija; Weiland, Travis (February 2025, Mathematics Teacher Educator)

   Racism impacts the lives of students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) in a myriad of ways. It is important that future teachers go beyond individual acts of racism to understand how racism operates as a system. To this end, we designed and implemented a statistical investigation with 13 preservice teachers using real traffic stop data from a local city. We were interested in how preservice teachers explained the role of racism in the policing of traffic stops. Drawing on a framing of systemic racism as an intertwining of individual, cultural, and institutional factors, we found that most of the preservice teachers made connections between the results of their statistical investigations and broader institutional factors that affect policing. Statistical investigations using large datasets that highlight disparities based on race provide affordances for preservice teachers to start thinking about systemic racism. Further, the investigations can normalize challenging conversations around race and racism in mathematics and statistics content courses. 

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