“So whose are we doing?”: Design ownership and prolonged decision making in elementary engineering (Fundamental)

Nicole Batrouny

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Conference: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Publication Date: August 23, 2022
Start Date: June 26, 2022
End Date: June 29, 2022
Conference Session: PCEE Technical Session 8: Engineering Design in Elementary School
Page Count: 26
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--41226
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/41226
Download Count: 462

Paper Authors

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Nicole Batrouny Tufts University

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Nicole Batrouny is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at Tufts University. She received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Denver and completed undergraduate research in biomechanics. She received her M.S. in mechanical engineering from Tufts University in 2019; her thesis explored the decision-making strategies and productive talk moves of 4th-grade students during an engineering curriculum that she designed and taught. Her current doctoral research at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach focuses on decision-making strategies and the personal, interpersonal, and external influences on those strategies across engineering educational contexts. Outside of research, she is a teaching assistant at the university's machine shop, where she assists students with a wide range of digital fabrication tools and precision machinery. Outside of school, Nicole is interested in biking, yarn crafts, sci-fi and fantasy writing, sustainable living, social justice, and the intersections of all of these.

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Abstract

Typically in engineering, especially in professional practice, it is expected that design decisions be made based on quantifiable criteria, constraints, and requirements. Engineering practice is also characterized by a less explicit set of intuitive senses, developed with time and experience. For example, an engineering designer may understand that, in some cases, subsystems can be designed and tested independently of the full prototype, or have an intuitive sense of which material may be a good fit for a part. For novice engineering students, especially elementary students, these senses are in stages of infancy. In addition, elementary students are often asked to work in teams, requiring them to establish roles and relationships, plan and change activities, gather and share information, generate and adopt concepts, and avoid and resolve conflict. Engineering design tasks require students to engage with both the technical and the social as they navigate the complexities of collaborative decision making. In this study, we address this intersection, asking In an act of explicit decision-making, what resources might elementary students draw on to make a choice? What role might feelings of design ownership play in collaborative decision-making?

The data for this study includes video and audio recordings of a team of three third-grade students, Nina, Lola, and Selena, as they complete an integrated science and engineering unit. Over the 10 days of the unit, the students were introduced to the problem of inaccessibility on playgrounds; studied forces and motion through a series of inquiry activities; and designed, built, tested, and iterated on a model-scale piece of accessible playground equipment. When reviewing the recordings of the first two days of the design challenge portion of the unit, we were struck by a prolonged episode of decision making. Using a qualitative case study approach and discourse analysis techniques, we analyzed the 40 minutes of interaction, spread across two weeks, where the team attempted to decide between two design sketches. Though the sketches differed only by one material choice, the students employed a myriad of approaches to make their decision; their approaches included having one team member decide, voting, games of chance, and combining ideas. However, each time a choice was made, it was upended by a member of the team— often the student whose design was not chosen. Even with the time and emotion the students spent on this prolonged decision-making episode, they completed a successful prototype of their design. During their reflections in the individual post-unit interviews, the students told cohesive stories of their design process which included specific mention of whose design was whose, as well as how each performed. This illustrative case study captures some of the many strategies that elementary students can draw upon to make decisions. More importantly, it shows that student teams may draw on multiple resources to make one decision, and that in lieu of more formal resources, feelings about designs may dominate students’ collaborative decision making.

Citation
Format

Batrouny, N. (2022, August), “So whose are we doing?”: Design ownership and prolonged decision making in elementary engineering (Fundamental) Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41226

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Typically in engineering, especially in professional practice, it is expected that design decisions be made based on quantifiable criteria, constraints, and requirements. Engineering practice is also characterized by a less explicit set of intuitive senses, developed with time and experience. For example, an engineering designer may understand that, in some cases, subsystems can be designed and tested independently of the full prototype, or have an intuitive sense of which material may be a good fit for a part. For novice engineering students, especially elementary students, these senses are in stages of infancy. In addition, elementary students are often asked to work in teams, requiring them to establish roles and relationships, plan and change activities, gather and share information, generate and adopt concepts, and avoid and resolve conflict. Engineering design tasks require students to engage with both the technical and the social as they navigate the complexities of collaborative decision making. In this study, we address this intersection, asking In an act of explicit decision-making, what resources might elementary students draw on to make a choice? What role might feelings of design ownership play in collaborative decision-making?

The data for this study includes video and audio recordings of a team of three third-grade students, Nina, Lola, and Selena, as they complete an integrated science and engineering unit. Over the 10 days of the unit, the students were introduced to the problem of inaccessibility on playgrounds; studied forces and motion through a series of inquiry activities; and designed, built, tested, and iterated on a model-scale piece of accessible playground equipment. When reviewing the recordings of the first two days of the design challenge portion of the unit, we were struck by a prolonged episode of decision making. Using a qualitative case study approach and discourse analysis techniques, we analyzed the 40 minutes of interaction, spread across two weeks, where the team attempted to decide between two design sketches. Though the sketches differed only by one material choice, the students employed a myriad of approaches to make their decision; their approaches included having one team member decide, voting, games of chance, and combining ideas. However, each time a choice was made, it was upended by a member of the team— often the student whose design was not chosen. Even with the time and emotion the students spent on this prolonged decision-making episode, they completed a successful prototype of their design. During their reflections in the individual post-unit interviews, the students told cohesive stories of their design process which included specific mention of whose design was whose, as well as how each performed. This illustrative case study captures some of the many strategies that elementary students can draw upon to make decisions. More importantly, it shows that student teams may draw on multiple resources to make one decision, and that in lieu of more formal resources, feelings about designs may dominate students’ collaborative decision making.
AU  - Nicole Batrouny
CY  - Minneapolis, MN
DA  - 2022/08/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - “So whose are we doing?”: Design ownership and prolonged decision making in elementary engineering (Fundamental)
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/41226
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--41226
ER  -