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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Less is More: Balancing Tradeoffs in an Engineering Activity During a Teacher Workshop
Despite the recent emphasis on the importance of K-12 students engaging in
engineering content and practices, there has been little research done about how teachers learn
engineering practices through teacher workshops and even less on how they utilize those
experiences to teach engineering in their classes. Using methods of interactional ethnography,
we analyzed data from an online teacher workshop in which elementary teachers engineered
solutions to a multi-criteria problem in which balancing tradeoffs was a key practice. We found
that teachers tended to focus on one criterion rather than both and lacked strategies to consider
balancing these tradeoffs. We also found that a second iteration afforded all groups to
demonstrate learning through improvement. Implications are discussed related to the
importance of a focus on balancing tradeoffs in teacher learning and on pedagogy of engineering
projects.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1930777
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10354819
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ISLS Annual Conference
- Volume:
- 16
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1161-1165
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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