Elementary Children's Awareness of Strategies for Testing Structural Strength: A Three Year Study

Gustafson, Brenda J.; Rowell, Patricia M.; Guilbert, Sandra M.

doi:10.21061/jte.v11i2.a.1

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Planned and controlled actions involved in making the artefact enhance manipulative and fine motor skills. Learnt and practised in an authentic setting as in the D&T unit, these skills can be valuable for the learning of school subjects (Benenson, 2001) like science (Gustafson, Rowell & Rose, 2000), mathematics (Bryant and Squire, 2001) and geography (Tversky, 2003).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and technology productions among middle school students: an Indian experience

Khunyakari

Mehrotra

Chunawala

et al. 2007

Int J Technol Des Educ

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The focus of this paper is students' design productions as they engaged in designing and making a windmill model to lift a given weight. This work is part of a project on the development of design and technology (D&T) education units and its trials among Indian middle school students (Grade 6, age 11-14 years) in different socio-cultural settings. Since D&T is not a part of the Indian school curriculum, the students had no earlier experience of design. Our trials included an exploratory phase followed by groups of students producing technical drawings and a plan for the making action (procedural map) before engaging in making the windmill model. The paper presents findings from a qualitative analysis of urban and rural students' pencil and paper productions, complemented by observations from video recordings of the collaborative engagement of these naïve designers. Students used graphical symbols, analogical, spatial and functional reasoning in their design activities. Choice of materials and tools, the nature of exploratory sketches, variety in design and attentions to issues of stability showed differences between the urban and rural groups. Some potential implications of D&T units for classroom learning have also been discussed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and technology productions among middle school students: an Indian experience

Khunyakari

Mehrotra

Chunawala

et al. 2007

Int J Technol Des Educ

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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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“…Foster & Wright (2001) found that children increased their technological capability and technological knowledge, having participated in design and technology activities. Gustafson, Rowell & Guilbert (2000) examined children's awareness of structures, finding that they can work out regimes for testing and evaluating the strength of a structure represented on paper.…”

Section: Design and Problem Solving In Technology Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying Indicators Related to Constructs for Engineering Design Outcome

Wilhelmsen¹,

Dixon²

2016

JTE

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With the publication of standards for teaching, learning, and the inculcation of technological literacy (International Technology Education Association, 2000), technology education in the United States has made a significant leap forward toward greater acceptance as a valid school subject. Standards represent content terrain claimed by a community of practitioners, and once stakes are put down, it is left to adherents to move in seeking title. It is doubtful whether we will witness a rush towards biotechnology or medical technology, new areas in the standards that do not naturally issue from our accustomed traditions. But for design there will be great interest since this is a content area over which the field has long toiled. Design is arguably the single most important content category set forth in the standards, because it is a concept that situates the subject more completely within the domain of engineering. Four of the 20 standards address the question of design directly. Standard 8 deals with the "attributes of design;" Standard 9 with "engineering design;" Standard 10 with "trouble shooting, research and development, invention and innovation, and experiment in problem solving; and Standard 11 with the "design process." It is not inconsequential that the foreword heralding the standards is authored by William Wulf, in his capacity as President of the National Academy of Engineering. This is a significant benediction for a subject whose advocates have for the past decade or so been of the view that its acceptance by the public and by the dominant academic culture of schools turned on the degree of rapprochement that could be worked out with the science as well as the engineering communities. The Project 2061 curriculum standards acknowledged the common epistemological ground shared by science and technology as school subjects, embodied in the designed world (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; Johnson, 1989). With ties with science thus formalized, engineering was but a step away. The sentiments expressed by Bensen & Bensen (1993) foreshadowed what appears now to be a significant opportunity for the field of technology education to lay claim to aspects of engineering as part of its curriculum purview. Arguing that the subject should

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Elementary Children's Awareness of Strategies for Testing Structural Strength: A Three Year Study

Cited by 8 publications

References 13 publications

Design and technology productions among middle school students: an Indian experience

Design and technology productions among middle school students: an Indian experience

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

Identifying Indicators Related to Constructs for Engineering Design Outcome

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