Urban elementary school students' reflective decision-making during formal engineering learning experiences (Fundamental)

Abstract

A key component of engineering design cognition is reflective decision-making that takes into account information about design options. As the Next Generation Science Standards ask K-12 students to learn the practices of engineering design, those students need opportunities for reflective decision-making. The purpose of our work is to shed light on the ways in which students exhibit reflective decision-making during engineering design experiences in culturally and linguistically diverse urban school settings. In this qualitative descriptive research study, we investigated the question, what does reflective decision-making look like among urban elementary school students participating in a formal engineering design curriculum? We video recorded seven Engineering is Elementary design challenges and collected student written work in four different urban classrooms, and we viewed and discussed video episodes and student artifacts at teacher/researcher meetings. Using qualitative descriptive methods, we analyzed the classroom data to systematically confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about the elements of urban elementary students' reflective decision-making in engineering. We found strong and wideranging evidence for six components of students' reflective decision-making. Based on this evidence, we argue that reflective decision-making does take place during engineering design experiences in culturally and linguistically diverse urban classrooms, and we present two student group case studies to support that argument. We discuss implications of this work for elementary engineering instructional design, pedagogy, and educational research.