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Undergraduate engineering students are commonly introduced to design in their first year and tackle a more authentic design challenge during senior year, with intervening courses focused on technical problem solving. Along this trajectory, students should acquire skills related to the development of engineering requirements, which are important to the technical framing of design problems. Through the lens of framing agency, this mixed-methods study explores first-year and senior students’ knowledge of engineering requirements as they engaged problems within their respective courses. Findings suggest that learning about requirements as a framing mechanism was not well-supported across the curriculum. Implications include a need to engage students in requirements development during the middle years and improve support for iterative framing and solving activities 

In the spring of 2020, schools across the United States closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing a sudden change from the traditional way education was provided. When schools resumed, many teachers found themselves teaching and scaffolding learning in a new situation, online. However, there is limited information on how teachers implement scaffolding—both in-person as well as online. As such scaffolding depends on teachers’ perceptions, this suggests the need for a measure of teachers’ perceptions of scaffolding across these modalities. This paper reports the design and development of a survey created to measure teacher perceptions of their agency/control related to and self-efficacy for implementing various forms of scaffolding and the forms of scaffolding they use. K-12 teachers who taught before and during the pandemic (N=105) completed the survey in spring/summer 2021. Using exploratory factor analysis, we found that the survey measured these constructs, and that constructs loaded separately by modality (online versus face-to-face). This suggests the survey could be used in shorter forms to provide information about teacher perceptions of scaffolding specific to their modality, in turn providing more information about the kinds of professional development they might benefit from.