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In most middle schools, learning is segregated by discipline. Yet interdisciplinary approaches have been shown to cultivate creative thinking, support problem solving, and develop interest while supporting knowledge gains (NAE & NRC in STEM Integration in K-12 Education: Status, Prospects, and an Agenda for Research. National Academies Press, Washington, 2014). The Designing Biomimetic Robots project emphasizes problem-based learning to integrate engineering, science, and computational thinking (CT). During a 3 to 4-week unit, students study the natural world to learn how animals accomplish different tasks, then design a robot inspired by what they learned. The project engages students in science, engineering, and CT practices. Over the course of a 3-year project, we used a design-based research approach to: (1) identify and describe strategies and challenges that emerge from integrated curriculum design, (2) explicate how a balance of integrated disciplines can provide opportunities for student participation in science, engineering, and CT practices, and (3) explore how a technology design task can support students’ participation in integrated learning. Data from three focal groups (one from each year of the project) suggest that a focused design task, supported by explicit and targeted supports for science, CT, and engineering practices, led to a student technology design process that was driven by disciplinary understanding. This work highlights the importance of drawing out and prioritizing alignments between disciplines (Barber in Educ Des, 2(8), 2015), to enable integrated learning. Additionally, this work demonstrates how a technology design task can support student learning across disciplines, and how engaging in CT practices can further help students draw these connections.

 

In the ConnecTions in the Making project, researchers and district partners work to develop and study community-connected, integrated science and engineering curriculum units that support diverse elementary students’ science and engineering ideas, practices, and attitudes. In the community-connected units, students in the third, fourth, and fifth grades use human-centered design strategies to prototype and share functional solutions to a design challenge rooted in the students’ local community while scientifically exploring the phenomena and mechanisms related to the challenge. One of the units is “Accessible Playground Design,” a grade three unit that engages students in designing a piece of accessible playground equipment. It comprises 10 lessons, approximately 1 hour each, including a launch lesson, followed by four inquiry and four engineering design lessons, and a final design exposition. 

Although curricular resources for elementary engineering design continue to grow, it remains challenging to identify assessment tools that focus on students’ reasoning within engineering design and that are feasible for classroom use and accessible for emerging writers. In collaboration with third-grade teachers, we developed an open-response task that asks students to evaluate and improve on the first iteration of a design solution. In this paper, we present the assessment task and an exploratory analysis of the pre- and post-unit responses collected from one classroom implementation using the final version of the task. The evaluate-and-improve assessment task presents a diagram of an unbalanced, lopsided cart for transporting classroom plants and asks students to identify problems with the cart design, propose changes to improve it, and justify those proposed changes. Across their pre- and post-unit responses, the 18 students proposed 14 different changes and provided seven different justifications to support those changes. Students included more justifications in their post-unit explanations, especially when they did not include any justifications in their pre-unit responses. Our exploratory study of this evaluate and improve task suggests that it gives third-grade students an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to scope problems, propose design iterations, and justify those changes. 

In the ConnecTions in the Making project, researchers and district partners work to develop and study community-connected, integrated science and engineering curriculum units that support diverse elementary students’ science and engineering ideas, practices, and attitudes. In the community-connected units, students in the third, fourth, and fifth grades use human-centered design strategies to prototype and share functional solutions to a design challenge rooted in the students’ local community while also exploring scientific explanations of the phenomena and mechanisms related to the challenge. One of these units is “Make Way for Trains,” a fourth grade geotechnical engineering unit comprised of 8 lessons, approximately 1 hour each, including a launch lesson, 6 alternating inquiry and engineering design lessons that build to the final design challenge, and a final design exposition. 

In the ConnecTions in the Making project, researchers and district partners work to develop and study community-connected, integrated science and engineering curriculum units that support diverse elementary students’ science and engineering ideas, practices, and attitudes. In the community-connected units, students in the third, fourth, and fifth grades use human-centered design strategies to prototype and share functional solutions to a design challenge rooted in the students’ local community while also exploring scientific explanations of the phenomena and mechanisms related to the challenge. One of these units is “Reservoir Rescue,” a fifth grade Environmental Engineering unit comprised of 12 lessons, approximately 1 hour each, including 2 lessons to launch the unit, 4 inquiry lessons, 4 engineering design lessons that build to the final design challenge, and 2 lessons to prepare for and host a design exposition. 

While engineering grows as a part of elementary education, important questions arise about the skills and practices we ask of students. Both collaboration and decision making are complex and critical to the engineering design process, but come with social and emotional work that can be difficult for elementary students to navigate. Productive engagement in collaborative teams has been seen to be highly variable; for some teams, interpersonal conflicts move the design process forward, while for others they stall the process. In this work in progress, we are investigating the research question, what is the nature of students’ disciplinary talk during scaffolded decision making? We explore this research question via a case study of one student group in a 4th-grade classroom enrolled in an outreach program run by a private university in a Northeastern city. This program sends pairs of university students into local elementary schools to facilitate engineering in the classroom for one hour per week. This is the only engineering instruction the elementary students receive and the engineering curriculum is planned by the university students. For the implementation examined in this study, the curriculum was designed by two researchers to scaffold collaborative groupwork and decision making. The instruction was provided by an undergraduate and one of the researchers, a graduate student. The scaffolds designed for this semester of outreach include a set of groupwork norms and a decision matrix. The groupwork norms were introduced on the first day of instruction; the instructors read them aloud, proposed groupwork scenarios to facilitate a whole class discussion about whether or not the norms were followed and how the students could act to follow the norms, and provided time for students to practice the norms in their engineering design groups for the first project. For the rest of the semester, an anchor chart of the norms was displayed in the classroom and referenced to encourage consensus. The researchers designed the decision matrix scaffold to encourage design decisions between multiple prototypes based on problem criteria and test results. Instructors modeled the use of this decision matrix on the third day of instruction, and students utilized the matrix in both design projects of the semester. Data sources for this descriptive study include students’ written artifacts, photos of their design constructions, and video records of whole-class and team discourse. We employ qualitative case study and microethnographic analysis techniques to explore the influence of the intentional discourse scaffolds on students’ collaborative and decision-making practices. Our analysis allowed us to characterize the linguistic resources (including the decision matrix) that the students used to complete four social acts during decision making: design evaluation, disagreeing with a teammate, arguing for a novel idea, and sympathizing with a design. This research has implications for the design of instructional scaffolds for engineering curricula at the elementary school level, whether taking place in an outreach program or in regular classroom instruction. 

A key feature of engineering design is collaborative, deliberate decision making that takes into account information about design options. K‐12 students need opportunities for this kind of decision making if they are to meet the learning standards for engineering set out in the Next Generation Science Standards.

This qualitative study sought to propose and operationalize a definition of reflective decision‐making among elementary students. We investigated how urban elementary students enact reflective decision‐making in a formal engineering design curriculum.

We used naturalistic inquiry methodology and video recorded seven Engineering is Elementary design challenges in four classrooms. Students worked in small teams, and we focused on their planning and redesign phases. Maximum variation sampling, constant comparative analysis, and microethnographic accounts demonstrated the diversity of resources students utilized in their decision making.

In student discourse, we found evidence for six reflective decision‐making elements: articulating multiple solutions, evaluating pros and cons, intentionally selecting a solution, retelling the performance of a solution, analyzing a solution according to evidence, and purposefully choosing improvements. The discourse patterns used to enact these elements both supported and interfered with students' achievement of design goals.

Our results suggest that during engineering design tasks, young learners working in small teams can respond productively to opportunities to engage in sophisticated discourse. However, further work is needed on tools and strategies that support reflective decision‐making by all students during engineering design in elementary school.

 

As engineering learning experiences increasingly begin in elementary school, elementary teacher preparation programs are an important site for the study of teacher development in engineering education. In this article, we argue that the stances that novice teachers adopt toward engineering learning and knowledge are consequential for the opportunities they create for students. We present a comparative case study examining the epistemological framing dynamics of two novice urban teachers, Ana and Ben, as they learned and taught engineering design during a four‐week institute for new elementary teachers. Although the two teachers had very similar teacher preparation backgrounds, they interpreted the purposes of engineering design learning and teaching in meaningfully different ways. During her own engineering sessions, Ana took up the goal not only of meeting the needs of the client but also of making scientific sense of artifacts that might meet those needs. When facilitating students' engineering, she prioritized their building knowledge collaboratively about how things work. By contrast, when Ben worked on his own engineering, he took up the goal of delivering a product. When teaching engineering to students, he offered them constrained prototyping tasks to serve as hands‐on contexts for reviewing scientific explanations. These findings call for teacher educators to support teachers' framing of engineering design as a knowledge building enterprise through explicit conversations about epistemology, apprenticeship in sense‐making strategies, and tasks intentionally designed to encourage reasoning about design artifacts.

 

Engineering design learning experiences are increasingly offered as part of elementary school, but research on how to support young learners’ knowledge construction during classroom engineering is still preliminary. Questions remain about how classroom supports can make engineering thinking visible so that students build engineeringknowledgealong with engineeringproducts. We report results from a case study of an 11‐day teaching experiment in two elementary classrooms. With the classroom teachers, we guided fourth and fifth graders to document their design iterations with a digital notebooking tool, participate in whole‐class design talks, and create and exhibit posters with “stomp rocket” design recommendations. We conducted a microethnographic analysis of students’ interactions with these notebooking, talk, and poster tools. Our findings characterize how students constructed engineering design knowledge through the discourse of sense‐making about rocket phenomena, decision‐making for specific rocket iterations, and representation‐making for external audiences. These results have implications for elementary engineering instruction: it appears productive for learning to structure whole‐class design talks aroundrepresentationsofsequencesof prototypes over time, rather than focusing only on current or best physical prototypes, and to structure engineering curriculum units so that they culminate with student‐generated sets of designrecommendations, rather than single design solutions.