Şenay Purzer

Assessing Early Engineering Thinking and Design Competencies in the Classroom

Young children are capable of understanding ideas that educators had once thought to be too complex for these ages. Children start to engage in creative design and develop engineering thinking at early ages as they play, create, solve puzzles, and ask questions. Just as it is important to highlight these activities as early engineering practices, it is important to use assessment practices necessary to support further development of engineering thinking. In this chapter, we lay the foundation for assessment of young children’s engineering thinking through discussion of current research on early engineering thinking and effective approaches to assessment as we outline engineering design competencies for young learners. We also present the Mosaic framework, a model that guides assessment practices in engineering and provides practical strategies that are necessary to maintain complexity while teaching and assessing engineering design to young children. We urge the community toward a multi-faceted view of assessment that targets student learning evidence and growth supported by curriculum design, and teacher professional development, along with assessment tools and strategies.

The relationship between design reflectivity and conceptions of informed design among high school students

ABSTRACT Although reflection is a key behaviour of expert designers, it is often a challenging task for new designers. In addition, research on the reflectivity of student designers is limited. The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to identify the levels of reflectivity while designing, and (2) to study the relationship between reflectivity and conceptions of informed design. We collected data from high school students engaged in an engineering design project. We developed a coding protocol to score levels of reflectivity in student reflections at three levels (low, medium, and high), and used the conceptions of design test to assess changes in student understanding of design activities. Using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, we determined if students tended to select more ‘key’ design activities and fewer ‘distractors’ within each reflection group. We also performed McNemar’s tests to determine which specific design activities were important within each reflection group after the design project. The results show moderately reflective students had higher gains in understanding of informed design activities compared to those with high or low reflectivity. Results also indicate that different design activities became important for students within each of the three reflective groups. Implications from this research indicate that groups of students experience changing conceptions of design in different ways. An understanding of what students deem important while designing would better allow teachers to encourage behaviours that are like those of informed designers.

Traversing the Barriers to Using Big Data in Understating How High School Students Design

The context of this paper is a “large learner data” project that seeks to respond to existing challenges by introducing educational data mining and learning analytics into K-12 engineering design research. To probe deeply into student learning, we are developing and refining computational techniques to analyze large process analytics datasets generated through a CAD-based software, Energy3D, that logs design process data as students complete an assigned design challenge, such as a net-zero energy efficient building. We are combining these process analytics with demographic data and pre/post-tests of science and design knowledge. In this paper, we revisit three illustrative research cases to reflect on our experiences and lessons learned with navigating big data, generating useful data visualizations, and integrating process analytics with traditional performance assessment methods to relate design actions to knowledge and learning outcomes.

Identifying the Characteristics of Engineering Innovativeness

ABSTRACT The use of science and engineering skills to address the novel challenges of modern society through innovative solutions is regarded as an essential strategy around the world. Many of the studies on innovators, however, are not specific to engineers. To address this gap, this study explored engineers’ views of innovation and the attributes of engineers who create, develop, and implement innovations through in-depth interviews with expert engineering innovators. The study was set in an interpretivist framework and developed a socially constructed description of engineering innovativeness. Forty-five US-based expert engineering innovators were interviewed; these interviews were coded using a grounded-theory approach until categorical saturation was achieved. The results include the identification of 20 characteristics of engineering innovativeness, as well as an ‘engineer’s definition’ of an innovation and several general descriptors of ‘non-innovative’ engineers. The significance of this study comes from its use of detailed qualitative data gathered from peer-recognized innovative engineers from industry, entrepreneurial ventures, and academia to identify and define characteristics of engineering innovativeness in particular. The identification of these characteristics has implications for the training and development of engineers, for engineering team formation and management, and for programs, policies, and interventions aimed at supporting innovative behavior by engineers.

A Comparison of Beginning and Advanced Engineering Students’ Description of Information Skills

Abstract Objective – The purpose of this research was to examine how beginning and advanced level engineering students report use of information when completing an engineering design process. This information is important for librarians seeking to develop information literacy curricula in the context of engineering design. Methods – Researchers conducted semi-structured interviews about information strategies used in engineering design with 21 engineering students (10 first and second year; 11 senior and graduate). Researchers transcribed interviews and developed an inductive coding scheme. Then, from the coding scheme, researchers extracted broader themes. Results – Beginning level engineering students interviewed: (a) relied primarily on the parameters explicitly given in the problem statement; (b) primarily used general search strategies; (c) were documentation oriented; and (d) relied on external feedback to determine when they had found enough information. Advanced level engineering students interviewed: (a) relied on both their own knowledge and the information provided in the problem statement; (b) utilized both general and specific search strategies; (c) were application oriented; and (d) relied on self-reflection and problem requirements to determine when they had found enough information. Conclusion – Beginning level students describe information gathering as externally motivated tasks to complete, rather than activities that are important to inform their design. Advanced level students describe more personal investment in their use of information through consideration of information based on their prior knowledge and questioning information. Future research should consider how to best support beginning level engineering students’ personal engagement with information.