. Rubric developmentand use represented our attempt to quantify our answers to the research questions and explorationof relationships among variables. In what follows, we explain our participant selection process,context for the study, the interviews we conducted, and our data analysis process.Project Participants Participants came from five classrooms in three schools in a school system in the mid-Atlantic area and were in the second half of their kindergarten year at the time of the study inspring 2018. Blakely Elementary is in a rural part of the county (one classroom); AdamsvilleElementary is a Title I school in an urban area (two classrooms); and Kellerton Elementary is ina middle-class suburban area (two classrooms); all school names
-institutional study of students’ transitions fromtheir capstone (senior) design experiences into engineering work [21-24]. The sections belowdescribe the sites, participants, data collection, and data analysis.Site DescriptionsThe research study involves four different universities: two large public comprehensiveuniversities (one in the mountain west and one in the mid-Atlantic), one small public technicaluniversity in the southeast, and one small private college in the northeast. Three have a year-longcapstone design program and one has a four-semester design sequence that spans the junior andsenior years. All focus heavily on industry-sponsored projects; three also include faculty-sponsored and national-competition projects. All emphasize