Assessing Problem-Framing Skills in Secondary School Students Using the Needs Identification Canvas

With programs like Project Lead The Way, engineering activities and curricula have increased in frequency in secondary school programs. In 2013, Next Generation Science Standards were published formalizing the importance of science and engineering practices in secondary schools as part of the ‘Three Dimensions of Science Learning’. For a typical secondary science department, the current engineering options can either be very expensive and/or very time consuming (often requiring engineering courses outside of traditional science courses). The purpose of a broader NSF-funded project is to create and evaluate a more accessible system for engaging students in one of the key components of engineering design: problem framing. This work presents one tool developed as part of that effort, the Need Identification Canvas (NIC), and the assessment methods developed for evaluating students’ engineering problemframing skills using the NIC. The NIC is a tool for guiding novice designers through the need identification process, specifically addressing four key subcategories: stakeholders, stakeholder needs, a need statement, and information gathering. Student responses in each category were evaluated using a rubric, developed as part of this effort. The canvas has been implemented with suburban high school biology, chemistry, physics, and physical science classes (N=55) as well as first-year engineering students (N=18) at a private undergraduate university to provide a basis of comparison for the higher levels of achievement. In addition to comparisons between grade levels, secondary students that have and have not been taking supplemental engineering courses as part of their program of study were compared. Significant differences were found amongst a variety of these subgroups. Introduction This study is part of a larger project to incorporate engineering problem-framing design actvities (EPDAs) into high school science classes. The most recent iteration of the Next Generation Science Standards [1] includes engineering as part of the disciplinary core ideas section of the performance expectations. Problem-framing activities are designed to help reach this measure in a manner that can be incorporated into high school science classes without a major overhaul. Many of the current engineering efforts, like Project Lead The Way [2] may require a major overhaul to course offerings and may be quite expensive for schools to implement. The overarching goal with the “Building Informed Designers” project is to incorporate engineering design into existing high school science courses with minimal expense to improve design thinking and problem solving by all high school students. A secondary goal is to increase the number of students who will pursue college or community college engineering career pathways. Problem solving and thus problem framing are a key first step of the engineering design process. Davis, Beyerlin, & Davis [3] describes the role of a problem solver as one in which she “examines the problem setting to understand critical issues, assumptions, limitations, and solution requirements.” Problem solving has been studied and found to be critical in design and decision making [4-8]. Complex problems can often be described as those that have more than one solution. These complex problems require problem solvers that can acquire relevant information [9], work within a context [10-13] and meet clients’ needs [14-15]. The measure for evaluation in this study is the Need Identification Canvas (NIC). The NIC (Figure 1) is a tool that is used to help students isolate a problem by looking at the stakeholders. The four sub-categories for this instrument not only include the stakeholders (those that are affected), but also stakeholder needs, a need statement, and additional information that must be gathered before the problem is clearly defined. Figure 1. Need Identification Canvas For each high school science course (biology, chemistry, physics, and physical science) crosscurricular scenarios are being developed. However, for the pilot study and instrument assessment, the scenario of building a spaceport is the focus. As students progress across courses, we plan to collect longitudinal data to measure improvement in student problemframing skills across semesters or even years.