Senay Purzer

Elementary Teachers’ Views about Teaching Design, Engineering, and Technology

While there is a growing interest in infusing engineering into elementary classrooms, very little is known about how well positioned elementary teachers are to teach engineering. This study examined elementary teachers’ perceptions of and familiarity with design, engineering, and technology (DET). We collected data from 192 elementary teachers using the DET teacher survey. While these elementary teachers thought teaching DET was important (Mean 5 3.46; SD 5 0.43), they were relatively unfamiliar with DET (Mean 5 2.01; SD 5 0.65). Years of teaching experience did not affect teachers’ familiarity with teaching DET and their perceptions of how importance DET was. Moderately experienced teachers showed stereotypical views of engineering. Furthermore, teachers’ motivations to teach DET differed based on their ethnic backgrounds. The results suggest a need to improve elementary teachers’ familiarity with design, engineering, and technology. Professional development activities should be guided by research on teacher knowledge, and establish an alignment between motivations of teachers and expectations of their schools to ensure administrative support.

A Cross-Case Analysis of Disciplinary Identities Communicated Through Design Reviews

In post-secondary educational settings, discourse is a mechanism by which students develop occupational identities as they engage in a particular community that communicates attributes of their prospective profession. This study focuses on revealing disciplinary identities and how they are conveyed and negotiated during interactions between design students and project reviewers. We draw upon Gee’s identity framework and focus on the enactments of disciplinary identity in three different disciplinary settings: choreography, industrial design, and mechanical engineering. A cross-case analysis indicated differences that were epistemological (e.g., subjectivity of reviews) and similarities in ways instructors modeled institutional identities. The results have implications for interdisciplinary activities and suggest that disciplines that engage in design have much to learn from one another.

Does diversity in novice teams lead to greater innovation

Design teams are commonly formed in engineering courses with the assumption that diversity leads to more innovative solutions. However, the literature indicates that this assumption is conditional, based on factors such as team effectiveness and how diversity is defined. Additionally, prior research has focused on expert teams, rather than the novice teams typical of many engineering courses. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between team diversity, as a function of gender and race, team effectiveness, and innovation within novice engineering teams. First, we examined the relationship between diversity and team effectiveness. We used an established peer evaluation system to measure the team effectiveness ratings of 275 four-person teams. Gender heterogeneous teams were more effective than gender homogenous teams, but there was no significant difference between racially homogenous and heterogeneous teams. Second, we analyzed student team project reports for innovative design solutions. There was no correlation between team effectiveness and innovativeness, nor did gender heterogeneous teams produce more innovative solutions than gender homogenous teams. These results suggest diversity, defined by gender or race alone, may not increase innovation within novice engineering teams.

Assessing idea fluency through the student design process

Engineering design is a complex activity for students to undertake and for instructors to assess. This research uses large learner data sets collected through automatic, unobtrusive logging of student actions in a CAD platform to address this difficulty in observing design behavior. We used a computer-aided design software that captured student design activities to investigate patterns of student design behaviors that are associated with idea fluency. We show how micro-level process data can be used to validate observations made from viewing the student design process through design replays. Students who engaged in high idea fluency showed evidence of fluency in both process data and design replays. Similar patterns were observed for low idea fluency students. There is great potential to investigate student design learning through system-collected data. Yet, how to justify the inferences made about students based on their process data is largely unexplored. Our results demonstrate how traditional forms of assessment data can be used to validate inferences made by process data. Implications of this work would be highly relevant to engineering educators as well as researchers who are interested in understanding the relationship between learner analytics and student learning.

Special session — Cognitive processes critical for ill-defined problem solving: Linking theory, research, and classroom implications

Research on ill-defined problem solving and design thinking is rich but spread across diverse disciplines. Some of the signature work had been done over previous decades by cognitive scientists while other work, such as research on design thinking, is more recent. During this special session, our goal is to present and discuss this literature with engineering educators who are interested in researching ill-defined problem solving and related ways to support student learning in their classrooms. As we examine these studies within the context of engineering, we will introduce key theories such as cognitive dissonance. We will also discuss how these studies inform teaching and student learning.

Cultures of innovation among chemical, civil, and mechanical engineering students: A qualitative study

Innovation has received particular emphasis in engineering education due to implications of global challenges, diverse human needs, and economic competitiveness. As such, many instructors explore new methods to help engineering students develop innovation-related competencies and researchers seek to understand how students connect with and learn about innovation. This study adds to that growing knowledge base by investigating the ways engineering students in different disciplines view and approach engineering innovation. Nine students in chemical, civil, and mechanical engineering participated in a two-hour laboratory protocol consisting of an idea generation task, a process mapping task, and a semi-structured interview. This qualitative study used a multiple case analysis approach to compare student perspectives in each discipline. Analysis revealed that students in each discipline demonstrated different perspectives along nine aspects of innovation: context, criteria, stakeholder involvement, teamwork, design process, iteration, knowledge, challenges, and personal motivation. These differences link to core aspects of each discipline. Since a qualitative approach with a localized sample was used, this work does not explain all differences or the extent to which they manifest, but this paper contributes to an emerging understanding of how work in different engineering disciplines can connect with innovation from a student perspective.

Using the Communication in Science Inquiry Project professional development model to facilitate learning middle school genetics concepts

This study describes the effect of embedding content in the Communication in Inquiry Science Project professional development model for science and language arts teachers. The model uses four components of successful professional development (content focus, active learning, extended duration, participation by teams of teachers from the same school or grade level) and instructional strategies for inquiry, academic language development, written and oral discourse, and learning principles as components of science activities. Teachers were given a pre/post‐institute genetics assessment. There was a statistically significant increase in scores for the entire sample and a statistically significant difference between science and language arts pre and post scores, with science teachers scoring higher in both cases.

Engineering Cognition: A Process of Knowledge Acquisition and Application

As an integrative and broad field, engineering incorporates many aspects of science, technology, and mathematics fields as well as social sciences. Engineers are often required to develop solutions to design problems in novel situations, with incomplete information and competing criteria. Design, one of the facets of engineering, is a process of managing this ambiguity and complexity through recurring knowledge production. In this chapter, we describe engineering cognition as the interaction and iteration between acquiring knowledge and applying knowledge. It is a novel problem, a novel context, a novel set of users, or combination of these that necessitates knowledge production at the heart of engineering. A challenge in the translation of this model of engineering cognition into teaching is the separation of acquiring knowledge and applying knowledge as two discrete activities rather than a united effort. In this chapter, we present a cohesive model of engineering cognition and discuss how this model can guide teaching, assessment, and curriculum design. Our arguments are built on prior research on teaching and learning engineering in both undergraduate and precollege education. The chapter concludes with recommendations for educators and researchers specifically focusing on the interaction between knowledge acquisition and knowledge application in the context of engineering design problems.

No patterns in pattern recognition: A systematic literature review

Pattern recognition is one of the fundamental competencies associated with computational thinking and STEM education. Although much has been written to define computational thinking (CT), we argue that CT is a multi-faceted construct and specific aspects of CT (such as pattern recognition) should be examined. The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic review of literature on pattern recognition to define pattern recognition as an aspect of computational thinking. The synthesis included the Engineering Village database (Compendex and INSPEC). We searched peer reviewed articles and the keywords, pattern recognition, pattern generalization and education. The initial search resulted in 208 articles. The screening of abstracts more closely resulted in 17 relevant articles, which were then read in detail by two researchers. The review of this pool resulted in two relevant articles, one with a focus on mathematics education and the other one in the context of medical education. Surprisingly there were no articles that examined pattern recognition as part of engineering or computer education. Further research examining specific aspects of CT is necessary.

Self-Efficacy and Mobile Learning Technologies: A Case Study of CourseMIRROR

Mobile devices and applications have reshaped daily lives of people of all ages. One outcome of these technologies is increased access to small, powerful computers, wireless communication, and unlimited access to information at any time. These technological innovations are influencing students’ learning outcomes and engagement behaviors in and out of classroom settings as well. Based on these advancements, there is a need for research studies to explore the relationship between students’ self-efficacy beliefs and their learning outcomes in the context of mobile learning technologies. In this chapter, we describe cognitive and motivational outcomes associated with a mobile technology called CourseMIRROR (Mobile In-situ Reflections and Review with Optimized Rubrics). CourseMIRROR was designed to create an interactive environment between students and faculty in college classrooms as it scaffolds students to reflect on their learning experiences while enabling instructors to efficiently monitor students’ reflections to inform instruction. Specifically, we addressed the following research questions in this chapter: (1) Do students with high academic self-efficacy beliefs generate high-quality reflections? (2) To what degree do students’ self-efficacy beliefs and reflection quality scores predict their learning outcomes?