Five principles for supporting design activity

Abstract

When educators have access to highly supported and field-tested design activities, the act of planning for implementation itself is a creative design process in need of support. Five principles for supporting well-established design activities are presented in this chapter. The central focus of the principles is to maintain students’ engagement in the foundational design process: cycles of expressing, testing and revising the object under design. The type of design activity selected to illustrate the meaning and application of the principles is model design, due to its importance in the disciplines of science and mathematics and its current emphasis in the Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. Selected model-eliciting activities (MEAs) are used for illustration of the five principles because the core design activity for each has been developed using rigorous design principles and each involves a substantive science problem that requires students to mathematize some construct (i.e., design a model) to meet a client’s need. Further, given the selected MEAs have been utilized in a wide variety of settings (e.g., urban, rural, suburban, gifted, support programs) at levels ranging in from middle school to college, they provide a context in which to exemplify the usefulness of the five principles for adapting core design activities to a variety of settings and levels.