Uncovering K-12 youth engineering design thinking through artifact elicitation interviews

Abstract

This exploratory research paper investigated the use of artifact elicitation interviews [1] in understanding youth meaning-making following design-based afterschool engineering activities. The Next Generation Science Standards bring engineering design content to K-12 students in formal settings, yet little is known about how to formally assess learning throughout the design process, particularly at the earlier grade bands (i.e., grades 3-5). In an effort to assess design thinking, 102 interviews with girls were videotaped across elementary and middle school programs in two cities. The interviews called on youth to give a guided, narrative description of their work on a design project accomplished in their engineering-focused, girls-only afterschool program. Interviews were augmented with programmatic observations, so the analysts could triangulate evidence from interviews with observations of girls engaged in the projects. In collaboration with the curriculum development team, a rubric was developed to measure the extent to which girls communicated effective engineering design, specifically: a) understanding of the design challenge, b) evaluation of design strengths and weaknesses, and c) evidence that participants were making decisions based on testing. Additionally, the participants were rated on their ability to describe the engineering design process. Themes emerged from the data related to program implementation as well as interview implementation. First, project specificity and the existence of formal testing procedures embedded in the whole group activity supported youth descriptions of testing failures and redesign practices. Second, the physical use of the artifact in communicating knowledge was evident in many interviews in which the youth may have lacked scientific language to describe their reasoning - gesture and referential language (e.g., pointing to an element and stating, "This part") assisted coders in understanding whether youth had conceptual understanding of design features. Finally, understanding of the engineering design process was expressed in multiple ways. Interview responses indicated implicit understanding of the engineering design process through the narrative that youth used to describe product development. In another segment of the interview, youth were asked to describe the engineering design process to measure explicit understanding. The analysts found incongruent responses related to implicit and explicit understanding of the engineering design process.