The Complex Dynamics of Student Engagement in Novel Engineering Design Activities.
McCormick, Mary.
2015
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Abstract: In engineering design, making sense of "messy," design situations is
at the heart of the discipline (Schön, 1983); engineers in practice bring structure to
design situations by organizing, negotiating, and coordinating multiple aspects
(Bucciarelli, 1994; Stevens, Johri, & O'Connor, 2014). In classroom settings, however,
students are more often given well-defined, content-focused ... read moreengineering tasks (Jonassen,
2014). These tasks are based on the assumption that elementary students are unable to
grapple with the complexity or open-endedness of engineering design (Crismond & Adams,
2012). The data I present in this dissertation suggest the opposite. I show that students
are not only able to make sense of, or frame (Goffman, 1974), complex design situations,
but that their framings dynamically involve their nascent abilities for engineering design.
The context of this work is Novel Engineering, a larger research project that explores
using children's literature as an access point for engineering design. Novel Engineering
activities are inherently messy: there are characters with needs, settings with implicit
constraints, and rich design situations. In a series of three studies, I show how students'
framings of Novel Engineering design activities involve their reasoning and acting as
beginning engineers. In the first study, I show two students whose caring for the story
characters contributes to their stability in framing the task: they identify the needs of
their fictional clients and iteratively design a solution to meet their clients' needs. In
the second, I show how students' shifting and negotiating framings influence their
engineering assumptions and evaluation criteria. In the third, I show how students'
coordinating framings involve navigating a design process to meet clients' needs, classroom
expectations, and technical requirements. Collectively, these studies contribute to
literature by documenting students' productive beginnings in engineering design. The
implications span research and practice, specifically targeting how we attend to and
support students as they engage in engineering design.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2015.
Submitted to the Dept. of Education.
Advisor: David Hammer.
Committee: Barbara Brizuela, Chris Rogers, Kristen Wendell, and Chris Swan.
Keywords: Education, and Engineering.read less - ID:
- 9593v6308
- Component ID:
- tufts:21480
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
