Children's Mechanistic Reasoning

Bolger, Molly S.; Kobiela, Marta; Weinberg, Paul; Lehrer, Richard

doi:10.1080/07370008.2012.661815

Cited by 39 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…For example, Piaget asked children to draw a bicycle and explain their thinking about "what makes it go" 17 . More recently, researchers in pre-college technology and engineering education have explored elementary students' ideas about the properties that make structures strong, stable, and thermally insulated 18,19,20 , and about the causal relationships in simple mechanical devices 9,21 . These kinds of conceptions about the functionality of technological artifacts form one important basis for students' ideas in engineering design, and national assessment efforts in technological and engineering literacy 22 suggest these conceptions should be considered for formative assessment.…”

Section: Students' Ideas Within Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Noticing, Assessing, and Responding to Students' Engineering: Exploring a Responsive Teaching Approach to Engineering Design

Wendell

Watkins

Johnson

2016 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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This research paper examines formative assessment in engineering design, unpacking the disciplinary substance that instructors must attend to in their teaching. Borrowing the framework of responsive teaching from the math and science education literature, we argue for the importance of closely examining the many moment-to-moment assessments and decisions that engineering teachers encounter. Responsive teaching is an instructional approach in which instructors base their pedagogical moves on what their students are saying and doing. Instead of predetermining what will happen in classrooms, teachers elicit students' ideas, interpret and assess disciplinary aspects of students' reasoning, and respond with pedagogical decisions based on their interpretations.Responsive teaching has the potential to be a particularly useful approach for teaching engineering design: As students adapt to new criteria and constraints when solving ill-defined engineering design problems, teachers need to be responsive to their changing needs. However, most of the work on responsive teaching has occurred in math and science education.In this paper, we follow in the tradition of math and science education researchers who use their own teaching episodes as the basis for scholarly research on responsive teaching. Using microanalytic analysis, we examined two video-recorded cases from our engineering teaching at both the elementary and university level to explore how different yet equally legitimate disciplinary goals can conflict with each other and produce "instructional tensions" for the teacher. We used purposeful sampling to select cases rich in opportunities to unpack student thinking in engineering. We present in-depth analyses of the tensions that emerged between different disciplinary goals in these STEM learning environments. These results point to the need for increased attention on how teachers manage the different disciplinary practices and goals in STEM activities, particularly when incorporating formative assessment strategies or adopting a responsive teaching approach.

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Section: Students' Ideas Within Engineeringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Noticing, Assessing, and Responding to Students' Engineering: Exploring a Responsive Teaching Approach to Engineering Design

Wendell

Watkins

Johnson

2016 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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“…The arrows represent the paths indicated by participants. Underlined text indicates linking words (Bolger et al, 2012) that causally connect mechanistic elements across the explanation. In the transcript, mechanistic elements coded through talk are red, while those coded through gesture are indicated in blue.…”

Section: Item Analysis Item Wright Mapmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to probe participant thinking during the AMRP administration, participant talk and gesture were coded according to an analytic framework used in a previous study (Bolger et al, 2012).…”

Section: Coding the Clinical Interviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reasoning about mechanisms is central to disciplined inquiry in science and engineering and should therefore be one of the foundations of a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education (Bolger, Kobiela, Weinberg, & Lehrer, 2012;National Research Council, 2001;Russ, Scherr, Hammer, & Mikeska, 2008;Weinberg, 2017). Mechanistic reasoning is one of the core competencies listed in the Next Generation Science Standards Engineering Concepts and Practices (NGSS Lead States, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, these are good systems for understanding how people representing a variety of ages and education actually apply the general principles of mechanistic reasoning elaborated by Russ and colleagues (2008) within specific contexts. Bolger et al (2012) engaged elementary and middle school students in flexible interviews (Ginsburg, Jacobs, & Lopez, 1998) over three or four days in which students investigated systems of linkages. Accordingly, Bolger and colleagues developed and verified mechanistic elements that were specific to systems of levers, from children's explanations of their motion and function, to those of professionals in engineering and physics ( ''), and (d) constraint via the fixed pivot (i.e., attention to the causal relation between the pivot being fixed to the board and the resultant motion, ''this part is attached and that makes this one [the left side of the output link], this side to move up and down.'').…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Supporting Mechanistic Reasoning in Domain-Specific Contexts

Weinberg¹

2017

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

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Mechanistic reasoning is an epistemic practice central within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. Although there has been some work on mechanistic reasoning in the research literature and standards documents, much of this work targets domaingeneral characterizations of mechanistic reasoning; this study provides domain-specific illustrations of mechanistic reasoning. The data in this study comes from the Assessment of Mechanistic Reasoning Project (AMRP) (Weinberg, 2012), designed using item response theory modeling to diagnose individuals' mechanistic reasoning about systems of levers. Such a characterization of mechanistic reasoning illuminates what is easy and difficult about this form of reasoning, within the subdomain of simple machines. Moreover, this work indicates how domain-general principles may be limited. The study participants included elementary, middle, and high school students as well as college undergraduates and adults without higher education. Although the majority of participants responded to the AMRP by diagnosing at least one mechanistic element (elements inherent to the working of systems of levers) as they predicted its motion, such reasoning was not trivial. In fact, the diverse reasoning by participants shows how systems of levers support elements of mechanistic reasoning. Moreover, this study provides evidence that the development of mechanistic reasoning is dependent on domainspecific experience.

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Development of Mechanistic Reasoning and Multilevel Explanations of Ecology in Third Grade Using Agent‐Based Models

et al. 2016

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In this paper, we present a third-grade ecology learning environment that integrates two forms of modeling--embodied modeling and agent-based modeling (ABMs)--through the generation of mathematical representations that are common to both forms of modeling. The term "agent" in the context of ABMs indicates individual computational objects or actors that obey simple rules assigned or controlled by the user. It is the interactions between these agents that give rise to emergent, aggregate-level behaviors in complex systems. While several researchers have argued for the effectiveness of ABMs for learning about complex systems, the design of classroom activity systems using ABMs, especially for elementary students, has received relatively less attention. In this paper, we report on a 2-week long proof-of-concept study conducted in a third-grade classroom of 15 students in which students began with an embodied modeling activity of foraging behavior, followed with the generation of mathematical inscriptions based on their embodied actions, and finally, conducted further inquiry of interdependence in an ecosystem using two separate ABMs. Furthermore, we show that the lens of mechanistic reasoning can be productively used to identify the process of students' conceptual development of interdependence in an Correspondence to: Pratim Sengupta;

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Children's Mechanistic Reasoning

Cited by 39 publications

References 28 publications

Noticing, Assessing, and Responding to Students' Engineering: Exploring a Responsive Teaching Approach to Engineering Design

Noticing, Assessing, and Responding to Students' Engineering: Exploring a Responsive Teaching Approach to Engineering Design

Supporting Mechanistic Reasoning in Domain-Specific Contexts

Development of Mechanistic Reasoning and Multilevel Explanations of Ecology in Third Grade Using Agent‐Based Models

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