Mental models elementary teachers hold of engineering design processes: A comparison of two communities of practice

Abstract

Educating K-12 students in the processes of design engineering is a movement that is gaining in popularity in public schools. Several states have adopted standards for engineering design. Beginning in the mid 1990s, curriculum designers began producing curriculum units for all grade levels at an ever-increasing rate, despite the fact that no common agreement exists on what should be included in the engineering design process used in K-12 education. Furthermore, very little pre-service and in-service professional development exists that will prepare teachers to teach a design process that is fundamentally different from the science teaching process found in typical public schools. This study provides a foundation upon which future studies about curriculum and professional development for engineering education can be based - a glimpse into what teachers think happens in engineering design compared to articulated best practices in engineering design.Lave and Wenger's work with communities of practice and van Dijk's multidisciplinary theory of contexts as mental models provide the theoretical bases for comparing the mental models of two groups of teachers to the mental models of design engineers (including this engineer/researcher/educator). The first group of teachers teaches from textbook and/or kit-based science programs. The second group teaches at least one unit in an engineering-based curriculum. The design engineers include this engineer/researcher/educator as well as professional designers featured in a video. These elementary school teachers and this engineer/researcher/educator observed a video of the design engineering process enacted by professionals, then answered questions designed to elicit their mental models of the process they saw in terms of how they would teach it to their students. The participants' mental models are generated from their discourse using van Dijk's components of context models; they are displayed side-by-side in color-coded columns. The key finding is this: Both groups of teachers embedded the cognitive steps of the design process into the matrix of the social and emotional roles and skills of students. Conversely, the engineers embedded the social and emotional aspects of the design process into the matrix of the cognitive steps of the design process. In other words, teachers' mental models show that they perceive that students' social and emotional communicative roles and skills in the classroom drive their cognitive understandings of the engineering process, while the mental models of this engineer/researcher/educator and the engineers in the video show that we perceive that cognitive understandings of the engineering process drive the social and emotional roles and skills used in that process. This comparison of mental models with the process that professional designers use defines a problem space for future studies that investigate how to incorporate engineering practices into elementary classrooms. Recommendations for engineering curriculum development and teacher professional development based on the results of this study are presented. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.