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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.