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.
more »
« less
The influence of notebooks on elementary teachers engaging in engineering practices.
This fundamental research in pre-college education engineering study investigates the ways in which elementary teachers learn about engineering by engaging in the epistemic practices of engineers. Teaching engineering explicitly in elementary settings is a paradigm shift, as most K-6 teachers are not taught about engineering in their preparation programs and did not do classroom engineering as students. However, current STEM education reforms require these teachers to teach engineering in science settings and it will require concerted efforts between professional development providers and educational researchers to better help these teachers learn about and teach engineering to their students.
Our study context consisted of 18 2nd and 4th grade teachers participating in one of two two-day workshops. The first day focused on what engineering is, what the epistemic practices of engineering are, and how to manage classroom engineering projects. The second day focused on how to teach a specific engineering unit for their grade level. Taking a sociomaterial view of learning, we asked the following research questions:
1. How do the engineering notebooks scaffold the teachers activities and discourse?
2. How and to what extent does the notebook support their engagement in engineering practices?
Our analysis triangulated between three data sources during a two-hour time period where teachers designed, tested, and improved enclosures intended to minimize cost and mass loss of an ice cube in a heat chamber (“Perspiring Penguins” (Schnittka, 2010)). We focused on teacher talk/action collected from video/audio recordings trained on four small groups (10 total teachers). We also collected engineering notebooks they used during this activity. After initial analyses, we followed up with select teachers with targeted interview questions to focus on clarification of questions that arose.
Our findings suggest that the teachers use the notebooks in ways that are significantly different from the ways engineers do; however, they are a useful pedagogical tool that supported them in attending to and discussing activities that were necessary to engage in engineering practices and design/re-design their technology. Additionally, our paper will describe specific examples where teachers had rich discussions that were not represented in the notebooks but there were references made in the notebooks that were not explicitly discussed. Implications for the importance of well-designed notebooks and the benefits of ethnographic methods for researching teacher learning will be discussed.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1930777
- PAR ID:
- 10442431
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings ASEE annual conference
- ISSN:
- 0190-1052
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
To support teachers in providing all students with opportunities to engage in engineering learning activities, research must examine the ways that elementary teachers support how diverse learners engage with engineering ideas and practices. This study focuses on two teachers' verbal supports in classroom discussions across two class sections of a four-week, NGSS-aligned unit that challenged students to redesign their school to reduce water runoff. We examine the research question: How and to what extent do upper-elementary teachers verbally support students' engagement with engineering practices across diverse classroom contexts in an NGSS-aligned integrated science unit? Classroom audio data was collected daily and coded to analyze support through different purposes of teacher talk. Results reveal the purpose of teachers’ talk often varied between the class sections depending on the instructional activity and indicate that teachers utilized a variety of supports toward students' engagement in different engineering practices. In one class, with a large percentage of students with individualized educational plans, teachers provided more epistemic talk about the engineering practices to contextualize the particular activities. For the other class, with a large percentage of students in advanced mathematics, teachers provided more opportunities for students to engage in discussion and support for students to do engineering. This difference in supports may decrease the opportunities for some students to rigorously engage in engineering ideas and practices. This study can inform future research on the kinds of educative supports needed to guide teaching of integrated engineering activities for diverse students.more » « less
-
Although engineering is becoming increasingly important in K-12 education, previous research has demonstrated that, similar to the general population, K-12 teachers typically hold inaccurate perceptions of engineering, which affects their ability to provide students with relevant engineering experiences. Studies have shown that K-12 teachers often confuse the work of engineers with that of automotive mechanics or construction workers or assume that engineering is only for “super smart” students who are naturally gifted or who come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. This indicates that many teachers do not understand the nature of engineering work and have stereotypical attitudes about who is qualified to be an engineer. These inaccurate perceptions of engineering among K-12 teachers may influence the way that teachers introduce engineering practices to their students and make connections between engineering and the other STEM disciplines. In addition, teacher self-efficacy has been shown to not only influence teachers’ willingness to engage with a particular topic, but also to have a significant influence on the motivation and achievement of their students. Research also indicates that high-efficacy teachers typically exert more effort and utilize more effective instructional strategies than low-efficacy teachers. The goal of this study was to examine the perceptions that pre-service K-12 teachers hold about engineers and engineering, and to further explore how those perceptions influence their self-efficacy with teaching engineering and beliefs about what skills and resources are necessary to teach engineering in a K-12 classroom. We first developed a survey instrument that included questions taken from two previously published instruments: the Design, Engineering, and Technology survey and the Teaching Engineering Self-Efficacy Scale for K-12 Teachers. Forty-two students enrolled in an undergraduate program at {Name Redacted} in which students simultaneously pursue a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field and K-12 teacher licensure completed the survey. Based on survey responses, six participants, representing a range of self-efficacy scores and majors, were selected to participate in interviews. In these interviews, participants were asked questions about their perceptions of engineers and were also asked to sort a list of characteristics based on whether they applied to engineers or not. Finally, interview participants were asked questions about their confidence in their ability to teach engineering and about what skills and/or resources they would require to be able to teach engineering in their future classrooms. The results of this study indicated that the participants’ perceptions of engineering and engineers did impact their self-efficacy with teaching engineering and their beliefs about how well engineering could be incorporated into other STEM subjects. A recurring theme among participants with low self-efficacy was a lack of exposure to engineering and inaccurate perceptions of the nature of engineering work. These pre-service teachers felt that they would not be able to teach engineering to K-12 students because they did not personally have much exposure to engineering or knowledge about engineering work. In future work, we will investigate how providing pre-service teachers with training in engineering education and exposure to engineers and engineering students impacts both their perceptions of engineering and self-efficacy with teaching engineering.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)This study investigates how teachers verbally support students to engage in integrated engineering, science, and computer science activities across the implementation of an engineering project. This is important as recent research has focused on understanding how precollege students’ engagement in engineering practices is supported by teachers (Watkins et al., 2018) and the benefits of integrating engineering in precollege classes, including improved achievement in science, ability to engage in science and engineering practices inherent to engineering (i.e., engineering design), and increased awareness of engineering (National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council; Katehi et al., 2009). Further, there is a national emphasis on integrating engineering, science, and computer science practices and concepts in science classrooms (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Yet little research has considered how teachers implement these disciplines together within one classroom, particularly elementary teachers who often have little prior experience in teaching engineering and may need support to integrate engineering design into elementary science classroom settings. In particular, this study explores how elementary teachers verbally support science and computer science concepts and practices to be implicitly and explicitly integrated into an engineering project by implementing support intended by curricular materials and/or adding their own verbal support. Implicit use of integration included students engaging in integrated practices without support to know that they were doing so; explicit use of integration included teachers providing support for students to know how and why they were integrating disciplines. Our research questions include: (1) To what extent did teachers provide implicit and explicit verbal support of integration in implementation versus how it was intended in curricular materials? (2) Does this look different between two differently-tracked class sections? Participants include two fifth-grade teachers who co-led two fifth-grade classes through a four-week engineering project. The project focused on redesigning school surfaces to mitigate water runoff. Teachers integrated disciplines by supporting students to create computational models of underlying scientific concepts to develop engineering solutions. One class had a larger proportion of students who were tracked into accelerated mathematics; the other class had a larger proportion of students with individualized educational plans (IEPs). Transcripts of whole class discussion were analyzed for instances that addressed the integration of disciplines or supported students to engage in integrated activities. Results show that all instances of integration were implicit for the class with students in advanced mathematics while most were explicit for the class with students with IEPs. Additionally, support was mainly added by the teachers rather than suggested by curricular materials. Most commonly, teachers added integration between computer science and engineering. Implications of this study are an important consideration for the support that teachers need to engage in the important, but challenging, work of integrating science and computer science practices through engineering lessons within elementary science classrooms. Particularly, we consider how to assist teachers with their verbal supports of integrated curricula through engineering lessons in elementary classrooms. This study then has the potential to significantly impact the state of knowledge in interdisciplinary learning through engineering for elementary students.more » « less
-
This research paper describes a study of elementary teacher learning in an online graduate program in engineering education for in-service teachers. While the existing research on teachers in engineering focuses on their disciplinary understandings and beliefs (Hsu, Cardella, & Purzer, 2011; Martin, et al., 2015; Nadelson, et al., 2015; Van Haneghan, et al., 2015), there is increasing attention to teachers' pedagogy in engineering (Capobianco, Delisi, & Radloff, 2018). In our work, we study teachers' pedagogical sense-making and reflection, which, we argue, is critical for teaching engineering design. This study takes place in [blinded] program, in which teachers take four graduate courses over fifteen months. The program was designed to help teachers not only learn engineering content, but also shift their thinking and practice to be more responsive to their students. Two courses focus on pedagogy, including what it means to learn engineering and instructional approaches to support this learning. These courses consist of four main elements, in which teachers: 1) Read data-rich engineering education articles to reflect on learning engineering; 2) Participate in online video clubs, looking at classroom videos of students’ engineering and commenting on what they notice; 3) Conduct interviews with learners about the mechanism of a pull-back car; and 4) Plan and teach engineering lessons, collecting and analyzing video from their classrooms. In the context of this program, we ask: what stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? What shifts do we observe in their stances? We interviewed teachers at the start of the program and after each course. In addition to reflecting on their learning and teaching, teachers watched videos of students’ engineering and discussed what they saw as relevant for teaching engineering. We informally compared summaries from previous interviews to get a sense of changes in how participants talked about engineering, how they approached teaching engineering, and what they noticed in classroom videos. Through this process, we identified one teacher to focus on for this paper: Alma is a veteran 3rd-5th grade science teacher in a rural, racially-diverse public school in the southeastern region of the US. We then developed content logs of Alma's interviews and identified emergent themes. To refine these themes, we looked for confirming and disconfirming evidence in the interviews and in her coursework in the program. We coded each interview for these themes and developed analytic memos, highlighting where we saw variability and stability in her stances and comparing across interviews to describe shifts in Alma's reasoning. It was at this stage that we narrowed our focus to her stances toward the engineering design process (EDP). In this paper, we describe and illustrate shifts we observed in Alma's reasoning, arguing that she exhibited dramatic shifts in her stances toward teaching and learning the EDP. At the start of the program, she was stable in treating the EDP as a series of linear steps that students and engineers progress through. After engaging and reflecting on her own engineering in the first course, she started to express a more fluid stance when talking more abstractly about the EDP but continued to take it up as a linear process in her classroom teaching. By the end of the program, Alma exhibited a growing stability across contexts in her stance toward the EDP as a fluid set of overlapping practices that students and engineers could engage in.more » « less