The informed design teaching and learning matrix

Abstract

Background: Design experiences play a crucial role in undergraduate engineering education and are increasingly important in K-12 settings. There are few efforts to purposefully connect research findings on how people design with what teachers need to understand and do to help K-16 students improve their design capability and learn through design activities. Purpose: This paper connects and simplifies disparate findings from research on design cognition and presents a robust framework for a scholarship of design teaching and learning that includes misconceptions, learning trajectories, instructional goals, and teaching strategies that instructors need to know to teach engineering design effectively. Method: A scholarship of integration study was conducted that involved a meta-literature review and led to selecting and bounding students' design performances with appropriate starting points and end points, establishing key performance dimensions of design practices, and fashioning use-inspired tools that represent design pedagogical content knowledge for teachers. Results: The outcome of this scholarship of integration effort is the Informed Design Learning and Teaching Matrix that contains nine engineering design strategies and associated patterns that contrast beginning versus informed design behaviors, with links to learning goals and instructional approaches that aim to support students in developing their engineering design abilities. Conclusions: This paper's theoretical contribution is an emergent educational theory of informed design that identifies key performance dimensions relevant to K-16 engineering and STEM educational contexts. Practical contributions include the Informed Design Teaching and Learning Matrix, which is fashioned to help teachers do informed teaching with design tasks while developing their own design pedagogical content knowledge. © 2012 ASEE.