Discourse and Collaboration
in Elementary Engineering
Design Talks
In collaboration with Jessica Watkins at Vanderbilt University and led by PI Chelsea Andrews, Design Talks is an NSF DRK-12 funded project focusing on the structure and dynamics of whole-class engineering design conversations, including talks about the macro-ethics of design. The Design Talks team includes teachers and education researchers who collaborate to plan and record classroom Design Talks with distinct purposes. We then use discourse analysis to build theory on the characteristics of classroom talk that supports elementary students’ knowledge construction and socio-ethical reasoning in engineering design contexts. Funded by NSF grant 2010139. Website under development at https://www.engineeringdesigntalks.org/.
Design Keeper
Design Keeper is a digital notebooking app designed for keeping track of engineering design projects. Featuring "cards" to store everything from "Ideas" to "Tests" to "Final Design," Design Keeper was designed for use on iPads as a non-prescriptive suite that could grow with students' projects. We studied its use in classroom environments and uncovered multiple ways it supported students' discourse ( see articles on our Publications page). Work funded by NSF grants 1316762 and 1623910.
Collaborative Disciplinary Decision Making
In her master's thesis, Nicole Batrouny studied student strategies for making engineering decisions together. In engineering experiences, students are expected to perform complex practices of engineering while (usually) working in collaborative teams, which presents a slew of challenges to novice learners. To explore the sources of and potential tools for navigating these challenges, she designed a teaching experiment to support students in decision-making and groupwork. Through a comparative study, she characterized three student strategies that facilitated collaborative disciplinary decision making during the engineering design challenge: talking about plans, responsive discussion, and naming. These strategies further characterize the ways elementary students engage in engineering and reinforce the importance of argumentation as a skill and a practice for young engineering learners.
Reflective Decision Making
Find the full paper, "Reflective Decision‐Making in Elementary Students' Engineering Design," on our Publications page.
Reflective decision making is a framework developed by Kristen Wendell, Christopher Wright, and Patricia Paugh through a study of elementary students engaged in engineering. In student discourse, they 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. Work funded by NSF grant 1316762 and 1623910.
Failure in elementary engineering
In her dissertation, "Elementary students' engagement in failure-prone engineering design tasks," Chelsea Andrews studied how students engage with physical failure in design tasks. She particularly explored how upper elementary students engaged in failure-prone engineering design tasks in an out-of-school environment. Through three empirical case studies, she looked closely at how students evaluated failed tests and decide on changes to their design constructions, how their reasoning evolved as they repeatedly encountered physical failure, and how students and facilitators co-constructed testing norms where repetitive failure was manageable.
Check out her full dissertation on our Publications page.