Kristen Bethke Wendell

Elementary School Engineering for Fictional Clients in Children’s Literature

The stories children read in elementary school can provide rich problem spaces for engineering design. In this chapter, we present snippets from our project, Integrating Engineering and Literacy (IEL), of students in grades three through five engineering for fictional clients. Children draw from the text to identify problems their clients encounter, consider and plan possible solutions, and test and revise their ideas. One finding is that children’s interest in the characters and understanding of the stories supports their thinking as nascent engineers. They use their understanding of the world and draw on past experiences to act as engineers while attending to relevant details the story. Educators should see these as strengths and build on them, listening to students and their ideas.

‘It’s not that easy to solve’: edTPA and preservice teacher learning

Abstract This three year qualitative study of a university pilot of the edTPA, a performance assessment for preservice teachers, questioned candidates’ learning at the nexus of claims that the edTPA serves a dual role as both a formative assessment for candidates’ ongoing learning as well as a summative assessment of their readiness to teach. The analysis highlighted affordances and constraints of the assessment in the areas of: (1) depth of professional learning, (2) differentiation for diverse learners, (3) focus on school, community and family context, (4) professional reflection within classroom realities, and (5) as an evaluation tool. The discussion positions the findings alongside other published implementation studies of the edTPA in terms of current reforms. It especially problematizes the positioning of preservice teachers as professional learners in light of pressures for compliance and standardization.

Elementary Engineering as a Synergistic Site for Disciplinary and Linguistic Learning in an Urban Classroom

This case study of new English-language learners in an urban elementary U.S. classroom addresses the synergy between disciplinary language and science, technology, engineering, math (STEM) learning. Social semiotic theory frames the discourse demands related to engineering design and the active use of discursive resources in students’ responses to these demands. Discourse analysis of students’ interactions and writing provides a fine-grained view of “language in use” within an engineering design space where students demonstrated linguistic agency and productive engineering accomplishments. The case provides insights for educators who seek to optimize the integration of the language of STEM with culturally and linguistically responsive engineering education.

Examining Experienced Teachers’ Noticing of and Responses to Students’ Engineering

Engineering design places unique demands on teachers, as students are coming up with new, unanticipated ideas to problems along often unpredictable trajectories. These demands motivate a responsive approach to teaching, in which teachers attend their students’ thinking and flexibly adapt their instructional plans and objectives. A great deal of literature has focused on responsive teaching in science and mathematics, but there has been little research or professional development on this approach in engineering. In this work, we conducted clinical video-based interviews with six elementary teachers experienced in teaching engineering to discuss what they noticed in their students’ thinking and how they responded. Using analytical methods based on the grounded theory approach, we identified four themes in what teachers noticed in their students’ engineering: how students (1) framed (or interpreted) the project, (2) engaged in the engineering design process, (3) exhibited informed designer patterns, and (4) communicated with each other in ways that supported their engineering. Although none of these teachers had a formal background in engineering, we show how these themes connect to disciplinary aspects of engineering design. We also identified challenges that teachers perceived facing when responding to students’ work. By showing teachers’ abilities and challenges for responsive teaching, these findings motivate a research and professional development agenda to support teachers in eliciting, noticing, and responding to their students’ engineering.

Examining two learner approaches in a making activity with university students

As the maker movement has introduced children and adults to learning by making, researchers have begun to explore different approaches to learning by making and ways that participants take up new fabrication techniques. This work examines instruction in a making activity as a way to scaffold learning in a making activity. University students are introduced to a new-to-them fabrication technique using two learning approaches, learning via step-by-step instructions and open ended exploration. This study examines how students privileged the disciplinary ideas and practices of their major, mechanical engineering.

Infusing Engineering Concepts into High School Science: Opportunities and Challenges

This chapter shares data and reflections on the challenges and opportunities of infusing engineering concepts into physical science at the high school level. Teachers involved in Project Infuse, a collaborative research project funded by the National Science Foundation, Discovery Research in K-12 is highlighted. Project Infuse was funded to research teacher learning through an innovative approach to professional development that is engineering concept-driven. The Project Infuse teachers and research team have been engaged in the development and refinement of an engineering concept base, the development of an assessment instrument to measure learning gains of the concepts, and approaches to infusing engineering into instruction. This chapter outlines the approach being taken by this project in these endeavors and highlights the key issues involved with infusing engineering concepts into science, which include what engineering concepts are appropriate for high school science and how these concepts can be infused into instruction. Since the goal of infusing engineering concepts is to facilitate both the learning of science content and engineering, one of the findings from the project has been the importance of embedding the engineering concepts into science-based scenarios and content. This is opposed to simply “doing” engineering-types of activities without a grounding in conceptual level understandings.

Opportunities for Reasoning About Energy Within Elementary School Engineering Experiences

Much of recent elementary engineering curriculum development and research has focused on supporting young students’ design abilities related to the “engineering design process.” However, engineering design also involves attention to physical principles and the modeling of how physical principles affect design outcomes. One of these principles is that energy must be transferred to any designed artifact by its power system, which is specified by the engineering designers, in order for the designed artifact to perform work. The purpose of this chapter is to identify opportunities for students to reason about energy during existing elementary school engineering activities. A review of literature on the engineering profession as well as of guidelines for K-12 science and engineering/technology education resulted in three main goals for young students’ applied knowledge of energy: the ability to recognize when a technology needs energy input, the ability to consider various modes of energy storage, and the ability to identify several possible energy transfer strategies. These learning goals then served as a basis for an analysis of the engineering design activities in Family Engineering (Jackson M, Heil D, Chadde J, Hutzler N, Family Engineering: an activity and event planning guide. Foundation for Family Science and Engineering: Michigan Technological University, 2011), a guide with 26 hands-on challenges useful for introducing children and their families to engineering. The analysis revealed that while several activities explicitly reference connections to energy concepts, even more activities have strong implicit opportunities for students to use reasoning about energy as an engineering design tool.