Digital Engineering Design Team Journals: Providing Multimodal Opportunities for English Learners to Explain Design Choices

Abstract

This department column explores digital and disciplinary literacies across learning contexts and disciplines within and outside of school. Digital enhancements will encourage readers to post questions, comments, and connections.

What initiates evidence‐based reasoning?: Situations that prompt students to support their design ideas and decisions

“…Making evidence‐based decisions is a core activity of engineers, and this study demonstrates the ability of students to support their design ideas and decisions in design‐based STEM education. Design tasks provide an opportunity for students to construct arguments and make evidence‐based decisions (Crismond & Adams, 2012; Mathis et al, 2016, 2017; Shanahan et al, 2018) similar to how authentic science problem‐solving situations provide a context for students to use scientific argumentation (Jiménez‐Aleixandre, 2007). Students' naturally occurring design conversations allow them to engage in practices of EBR, and teachers can prompt evidence‐based discourses in their engineering instruction.…”

“…In precollege engineering design settings, research related to EBR is fairly recent (Wilson-Lopez et al, 2020). Engineering design tasks have been shown to provide opportunities for precollege students to construct arguments and make evidence-based decisions (Crismond & Adams, 2012;Mathis et al, 2016Mathis et al, , 2017Shanahan et al, 2018). Crismond and Adams (2012) put forward the Informed Design Teaching and Learning Matrix for K-12 students, which includes that "informed designers collect, organize, and analyze evidence" (p. 745) to help make design decisions about the technology the students are working to design.…”

“…Crismond and Adams (2012) put forward the Informed Design Teaching and Learning Matrix for K-12 students, which includes that "informed designers collect, organize, and analyze evidence" (p. 745) to help make design decisions about the technology the students are working to design. Shanahan et al (2018) demonstrated that using journals as a means to document design decisions aided English Learners to explain their design choices. Mathis et al (2016) found that a team of middle-school students used EBR the most while planning a design idea (i.e., justifying what they think will be a successful design) and evaluating the tested design solution (i.e., justifying whether the design was successful).…”

“…While the transcripts of audio files provided us rich information about students' use of EBR, we were unable to analyze nonverbal modes of student actions in our analysis. A future study could analyze both nonverbal and verbal actions of students while also focusing on social interaction in small design teams, for example, as Shanahan et al (2016Shanahan et al ( , 2018 describe the importance of students learning and practicing engineering as they engage in productive communication that involves verbal and nonverbal communication. Second, because we used an abbreviated, modified version of TAP to identify EBR, we did not analyze the quality of the instances of EBR.…”

The Uses of Engineering Notebooks Among Pre‐Engineering Students at a Hispanic‐Serving Institution

“…An emerging body of scholarship has examined disciplinary literacies in engineering, specifically in K–12 settings (Paugh & Wendell, 2021; Wilson et al, 2014; Wilson‐Lopez et al, in press; Wright et al, 2018). Some studies have focused on linguistically diverse students, including English Learners (McVee et al, 2017; Shanahan et al, 2018) and dual language learners (Esquinca et al, 2021). Shanahan et al (2018) examined design journals in an elementary‐level Engineering Club that involved students traditionally underrepresented in engineering, including English Learners; the design journals served as a site for engagement in relevant and authentic engineering practices in engineering to “experience how experts use multiple resources beyond oral and written language to represent and discuss their learning” (p. 448).…”