Search for: All records

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 “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. 

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.