Elementary Students Navigating the Demands of Giving Engineering Design Peer Feedback (Fundamental)

Fatima Rahman; Chelsea Joy Andrews; Kristen B. Wendell; Nicole Alexandra Batrouny; Tejaswini S. Dalvi

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Conference: 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Tampa, Florida
Publication Date: June 15, 2019
Start Date: June 15, 2019
End Date: June 19, 2019
Conference Session: Communication in Pre-College Engineering Education
Tagged Division: Pre-College Engineering Education
Page Count: 22
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--32699
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/32699
Download Count: 612

Paper Authors

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Fatima Rahman Tufts University

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STEM Education graduate student at Tufts University. Interests: Pre-college engineering design for under-represented minorities, Community-connected engineering design in pre-college classrooms

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Chelsea Joy Andrews Tufts University Center for Engineering Education and Outreach orcid.org/0000-0002-9017-595X

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Chelsea Andrews is a post-doctoral researcher at Tufts University and University of Massachusetts-Boston in STEM education. She received a B.S. from Texas A&M University in ocean engineering, an S.M. from MIT in civil and environmental engineering, and a PhD from Tufts University in Engineering Education. Her current research includes investigating children's engagement in engineering design through in-depth case study analysis.

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Kristen B. Wendell Tufts University

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Kristen Wendell is Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Education at Tufts University. Her research efforts at at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach focus on supporting discourse and design practices during K-12, teacher education, and college-level engineering learning experiences, and increasing access to engineering in the elementary school experience, especially in under-resourced schools. In 2016 she was a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). https://engineering.tufts.edu/me/people/faculty/kristen-bethke-wendell

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Nicole Alexandra Batrouny Tufts University

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PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Tufts University. Interests: upper elementary engineering education, integrated science and engineering, collaboration in engineering, decision making in engineering.

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Tejaswini S. Dalvi University of Massachusetts, Boston

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Abstract

We report on a study of the ways in which elementary students approach engineering design feedback. By feedback, we mean information that describes how a process or product meets or strays from particular criteria. Giving and accepting feedback from different stakeholders at different points in time is one way that professional engineers improve the quality of their design processes and solutions. Participation in the exchange of feedback can be a meaningful activity for students learning engineering design. At the pre-college level, researchers have begun to look at the ways in which design critique protocols influence students’ design discourse. However, there are still many open questions about how elementary students give and receive feedback and how feedback experiences influence their engineering learning.

Here we present a case study illustrating how one team of third graders handled the task of generating peer feedback during a science-engineering integrated unit. Grounded in the perspective that learning engineering involves becoming a more proficient participant in design practices, our study explores the research question, What intellectual, social, and emotional demands do elementary students navigate while collaboratively generating peer feedback on engineering designs?

The focus episode of this study occurred during the eighth lesson of a 10-lesson unit on forces and motion and wheelchair-accessible playground design. For the unit’s design task, students designed, built, and tested small-scale functional prototypes of playground equipment on a 12-inch square foam platform. Teams documented their process in a team design notebook. In the hour-long feedback session, each design team generated written feedback for three other groups. A handout provided a checklist of questions to prompt students to attend to the details of their peers’ work and to avoid empty praise (e.g., “Good job!”) or overly generic feedback (e.g., “It works.”). The handout also had free response areas with prompts of “Something that impressed us” and “A suggestion for improvement” for the other team’s physical prototype and their design notebook.

Data for this qualitative descriptive case study consist of video, audio, and written artifacts from one student triad during the entire feedback session. Using interaction analysis methods, we found that two major tensions arose for the three students as they attempted to collaboratively generate feedback for other teams’ design products and processes. Confronting these tensions required substantial social and emotional regulation efforts by the students. The two tensions that the students actively discussed were (a) whether to prioritize being “honest” or being “kind” to the other team and (b) whether to critique the design artifact as it had been fabricated or to critique the ideas assumed to be behind it (but perhaps not successfully expressed).

This study has implications for engineering educators seeking to support students in generating useful but respectful feedback, making sense of prompts for different kinds of feedback, and navigating the social and emotional challenges of feedback sessions.

Citation
Format

Rahman, F., & Andrews, C. J., & Wendell, K. B., & Batrouny, N. A., & Dalvi, T. S. (2019, June), Elementary Students Navigating the Demands of Giving Engineering Design Peer Feedback (Fundamental) Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32699

TY - CPAPER
AB - We report on a study of the ways in which elementary students approach engineering design feedback. By feedback, we mean information that describes how a process or product meets or strays from particular criteria. Giving and accepting feedback from different stakeholders at different points in time is one way that professional engineers improve the quality of their design processes and solutions. Participation in the exchange of feedback can be a meaningful activity for students learning engineering design. At the pre-college level, researchers have begun to look at the ways in which design critique protocols influence students’ design discourse. However, there are still many open questions about how elementary students give and receive feedback and how feedback experiences influence their engineering learning.

Here we present a case study illustrating how one team of third graders handled the task of generating peer feedback during a science-engineering integrated unit. Grounded in the perspective that learning engineering involves becoming a more proficient participant in design practices, our study explores the research question, What intellectual, social, and emotional demands do elementary students navigate while collaboratively generating peer feedback on engineering designs?

The focus episode of this study occurred during the eighth lesson of a 10-lesson unit on forces and motion and wheelchair-accessible playground design. For the unit’s design task, students designed, built, and tested small-scale functional prototypes of playground equipment on a 12-inch square foam platform. Teams documented their process in a team design notebook. In the hour-long feedback session, each design team generated written feedback for three other groups. A handout provided a checklist of questions to prompt students to attend to the details of their peers’ work and to avoid empty praise (e.g., “Good job!”) or overly generic feedback (e.g., “It works.”). The handout also had free response areas with prompts of “Something that impressed us” and “A suggestion for improvement” for the other team’s physical prototype and their design notebook.

Data for this qualitative descriptive case study consist of video, audio, and written artifacts from one student triad during the entire feedback session. Using interaction analysis methods, we found that two major tensions arose for the three students as they attempted to collaboratively generate feedback for other teams’ design products and processes. Confronting these tensions required substantial social and emotional regulation efforts by the students. The two tensions that the students actively discussed were (a) whether to prioritize being “honest” or being “kind” to the other team and (b) whether to critique the design artifact as it had been fabricated or to critique the ideas assumed to be behind it (but perhaps not successfully expressed).

This study has implications for engineering educators seeking to support students in generating useful but respectful feedback, making sense of prompts for different kinds of feedback, and navigating the social and emotional challenges of feedback sessions.

AU - Fatima Rahman
AU - Chelsea Joy Andrews
AU - Kristen B. Wendell
AU - Nicole Alexandra Batrouny
AU - Tejaswini S. Dalvi
CY - Tampa, Florida
DA - 2019/06/15
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Elementary Students Navigating the Demands of Giving Engineering Design Peer Feedback (Fundamental)
UR - https://peer.asee.org/32699
DO - 10.18260/1-2--32699
ER -