Viewing Student Engineering through the Lens of "Engineering Moments": An Interpretive Case Study of 7th Grade Students with Language-based Learning Disabilities

Though there is a growing consensus that engineering instruction should be incorporated into United States K-12 classrooms, little research has focused on what student engineering looks like in these classroom setting. Topics for investigation include how students understand engineering tasks, which behaviors can be viewed as age-appropriate engineering, and how students may coordinate these behaviors to create a coherent engineering process. In addition, there is a paucity of research focused on the engineering of students with learning disabilities, despite the fact that U.S. classrooms include many students with reading and other learning challenges. In this study, we focus on a small class of students with language-based learning disabilities engaged in a literature-based engineering project. Students with LBLD generally have difficulty with word recognition and fluency, leading to struggles with reading comprehension. Additionally, these students may also face executive function challenges, including issues with memory, attention, organization of information, and generalization of skills to new situations. As these students proceeded through their engineering unit, we looked for evidence of “engineering moments,” or moments where students engage in behaviors and thinking that can be viewed as the foundations of productive engineering practice. These engineering moments may include defining problems, planning, designing solutions, and engaging in evidence-based arguments. We argue that the students who successfully engaged in the literature-based engineering challenge exhibited capabilities including the ability to frame problems, use drawings and plans to guide their building, make informed design decisions, and reflect on and evaluate their work. The students who viewed the purpose of the unit as building a working prototype also exhibited the most coherent engineering process. Additional support and structure may be necessary, however, to help all students, including those with LBLD, navigate the complexities of open-ended engineering projects. Introduction According to IBM’s 2010 survey of over 1500 CEOs, creative thinking will be more important than any other trait for today’s students to succeed in an increasing complex world. The American Society of Engineering Education K-12 Center asserts that “engineering is creativity,” and that “problem solving and innovation brings out the best ideas from every student.” (pp.1) Engaging in engineering practices not only piques students’ curiosity, captures their interest, and motivates their study, but also helps them deeply embed knowledge into their personal worldview, empowering them to tackle the major challenges confronting society today and in the future. The classroom context, however, presents implementation challenges for open-ended engineering activities. These challenges are related in part to a strong focus on highly standardized curricula in current educational institutions in the U.S., 2 a focus that stands in stark contrast to the flexible, varied, failure-accepting atmosphere necessary for students to engage in open-ended engineering projects. In addition, though there is a general consensus that P ge 24358.2 incorporating engineering instruction into K-12 schools is desirable, researchers and educators must work to deepen our understanding of what engineering design practices look like for younger students and how to support student learning in this context. It is also important to note that students with learning disabilities can be found in every classroom and every school, yet there is a paucity of research on how students engage in open-ended projects or on instructional techniques that might support their engineering process. In order to design and evaluate effective engineering curricula, we must learn more about how all learners engage in engineering projects and what supports may be most useful to particular students. The engineering design activity presented in this paper is part of a larger NSFfunded project entitled Novel Engineering (formerly Integrating Engineering and Literacy.) This project has been implemented in over 20 classrooms with students in grades 3 through 7. The engineering design activities are literature-based. Students read high-quality stories or novels, identify problems that characters face and design possible solutions. In a sense, the characters become the students’ clients. The setting, character traits, events, and other information in the book provide information about constraints and resources. Previous work on these units has shown that complex problems presented in children’s literature can foster the development of engineering thought and practice in the classroom. In addition, analyses of data from this study suggest that students’ purposeful use of information from the text in service of designing engineering solutions may support reading comprehension in a traditional classroom setting. It is still unclear, however, how students with learning disabilities engage in open-ended engineering projects and whether text-based projects are beneficial to students with weaker reading skills, including students with documented reading disabilities. What are Engineering Moments? The National Research Council’s Framework lists eight “engineering practices” students should be expected to engage in, including defining problems, developing and using models, planning, analyzing and interpreting data, using mathematics and computational thinking, designing solutions, engaging in evidence-based arguments, and obtaining, evaluating and communicating information. Among experts, these practices translate to a highly iterative, reflective process involving complex problem framing, thorough research, analysis of tradeoffs, and controlled testing. 14 It is widely acknowledged that student engineering does not generally look like that of professionals, in that students may appear to skip doing research, conduct unsystematic tests or favor immediate building rather than planning in advance. Recent work, however, suggests that students can engage in age-appropriate engineering practices. For example, students have been found to discuss the complexities of a problem scope, effectively plan using design drawings, and engage in legitimate testing setups. This paper is motivated by the conjecture that students engaged in engineering projects may exhibit productive behaviors that could be a good foundation for developing more sophisticated engineering practices. These specific behaviors may be seen as productive, but may not always be connected, coordinated, or otherwise cohere into what would seem to observers as an organized design process. A productive line of inquiry is to investigate the moments when students engage in activities or behaviors involving skills or practices at the root of engineering. By doing so, we can learn more about the skills and understandings that students bring to their engineering projects and learn more about how to support primary and secondary students’ engineering. P ge 24358.3 A central purpose of this paper, therefore, is to identify and describe “engineering moments,” or times during the unit when students exhibit behaviors, practices, or thinking that are associated with productive engineering and that can be considered the beginnings or foundations of a more sophisticated engineering practice. By recognizing engineering moments, we hope to add concrete examples to the conversation about how young students engage in engineering projects. We aim to describe what engineering could mean for these students in order to help educators and researchers identify behaviors that should be recognized, encouraged and supported in the classroom. In order to classify a moment as an “engineering moment,” we are informed by existing literature and experience. We draw on engineering practices of experienced designers, current work published on elementary and middle school engineering, and our own experiences as both engineers and educators. Engineering moments for students may include times when students use knowledge about materials, constraints, or their understanding of science to make design decisions, evaluate their product using consistent and relevant criteria, and use a variety of planning methods that support their overall process. The messy, disjointed, or unfocused nature of many students’ overall design processes does not necessarily detract from the value of their individual engineering moments. For example, two students in a freshmen design course argue about how much force the gearing system on their robot chassis is going to need to produce, and then abruptly shift to comparing dining halls on campus. We would argue that their shift in focus is a break in their design process, but does not detract from the fact that they were, however briefly, having a design conversation similar to those of professional engineers. In this study, we carefully analyze specific engineering moments, rather than attempting to quantify and code all engineering moments in the data collected. This method suits both the nature of our data and our core motivation. First, the students participating in the study were not on camera 100% of the time. Despite attempts to capture as much of their in-class engineering experience as possible, students frequently walked out of range of cameras or groups split up to pursue different tasks. Students sometimes moved around to confer with teachers, look at projects developed by other students, examine the material bin, and look up information online. Attempts to quantify engineering moments would not be appropriate given the incomplete data set and the likelihood that we would be missing important engineering moments. Additionally, our goal is to establish the phenomenon of “engineering moments” in student engineering practice and to describe these moments in some depth. Therefore, a