Collective reasoning in elementary engineering education

Abstract

Properly designed engineering curricula can engage students in the engineering design process to foster creativity, problem solving, and communicative competence. This chapter examines how curricula can be designed to provide learning opportunities for students as they propose, communicate, modify, and evaluate multiple solutions within and across small group and whole class conversations to optimize their engineering designs. By making the criteria and constraints, prototypes, and proposed solutions available for public scrutiny, students can hold themselves and each other accountable across discourse events in classrooms. In the illustrative case of elementary engineering presented in this chapter, students analyze data collected by themselves and classmates and use the results to make evidence-based decisions about engineering solutions in an iterative engineering design process.