Advocates of PBL have explored ways to create meaningful understandings of STEM ideas and skills in students by having them solve problems and projects, including design tasks, that range from the well- to the ill-defined, are set within contexts that students consider authentic and sometimes cross disciplinary boundaries. Two learning outcomes are relevant to doing informed design and contain elements of both scientific inquiry and engineering design are described in this chapter. Design rules-of-thumb are contextualized generalizations that link the effects of varying product features with performance outcomes, and lie somewhere in the middle of a continuum that on one end holds abstractions of science and engineering science (e.g., Newton’s Laws of Motion; Hook’s Law), and on the other end craft-like recipes for effective practice. Their use can complement the case-based reasoning and deductive thinking that designers employ when making informed design decisions. Diagnositic troubleshooting is a critical design strategy that is essential for designers to use in order to improve ideas and prototypes over multiple iterations. The dilemma of using constructivist or direct instruction approaches (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) to achieve will likely inspire debate long into the future, and may only be resolved when researchers and teachers can place “thinking caps” on learners and get real-time imaging of actual neural activity to reveal differential impacts of different instructional interventions. Until that time comes, educators who want to use design projects to teach STEM subjects should weigh the benefits and tradeoffs of each approach (see Matrix Pattern E) before making their instruction choices, and as well should look to future research to inform this longstanding debate. Such research should clearly articulate the operational definitions and “vector of instructional components” for all approaches being considered, as Klahr has recently suggested (2010), and assess their impacts on gains in students’ STEM learning and capacity to do “informed designing.” I would add that testing with “impoverished” forms of any instructional approach should be avoided. Asking students to design without scaffolding, where in essence students would need to invent the mechanical elements needed to construct a device, or discover laws of physics and engineering based on experiments they run, has little chance for success or value as research that can inform classroom practice. The smart use of scaffolding is a must when doing and testing design-based project work, as it has been with other flavors of PBL (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn, 2007). The direct instruction treatment in this proposed study might include strategies like simply reading about the engineering design process (Atman and Bursic, 1996), cognitive tutoring, providing subjects finished models of designed products and worked examples showing the thinking of experts doing design tasks. The constructivist treatment in the proposed research might use materials developed in line with the three curriculum design principles that Kanter (2010) describes for building meaningful science understandings with design projects. These include: (a) motivating students with a need to learn key STEM concepts, (b) helping students construct these ideas via first-hand experiences, and (c) helping students structure their new knowledge for successful retrieval when designing. The pedagogical recommendations associated with re-introducing design courses into undergraduate engineering programs that were made by a small group of engineering educators in the early 1960s in effect identified an Achilles heel of direct instruction of the day and attempted to redress it. The flaw may relate to a problem of a certain type of transfer – a review of the transfer literature as it relates to ETE can be found in chapter No. four in this volume, contributed by Johnson, Dixon, Daugherty and Oenardi. Students in the 1960s who developed proficiency in solving well-defined problems did mainly tasks involving analysis (e.g., solving end-of-chapter problems in a heat transfer course), but very little synthesis, which is a central component to design thinking (Jones, 1984, p. 63). What the Committee on Engineering Design (1961) described as lacking in engineering undergraduates whose training mainly involved solving well-defined engineering science problems was that they had not developing intellectually and attitudinally to deal with the risks, uncertainties and challenges of solving ill-defined design problems and projects. What they recommended was not to replace engineering science with design, nor to continue with the engineering science status quo, but to employ a hybrid approach that involved the scheduling and coordination of both kinds of courses and instruction. The constructivist versus direct instruction dilemma and debate has ignored this third pedagogical option and potential treatment for the proposed study – the use of a hybrid approach that combines the two instructional methods. The research being proposed here should therefore also test a “multi-attribute” hybrid instructional treatment, one that blends constructivist and direct instruction approaches. Subjects in the hybrid group at times might explore materials to build connections with prior knowledge and face the challenge of proposing and constructing new ideas. At other times, they would experience direct instruction to build relevant science and engineering science ideas in long-term memory so that they could produce meaningful explanations regarding how their devices do and do not work. Among the teaching strategies that might be included in this third treatment would be approaches that bridge inquiry and design and support students in developing and using design rules-of-thumb and doing effective diagnostic troubleshooting. The proposed research study would report on the degree to which each of the three instructional approaches – constructivist, direct instruction and hybrid – helped students in schools learn STEM disciplinary knowledge and skills, and gain confidence and self-efficacy in addressing and completing design projects. Such research would be critical to ETE practitioners because it could help them better prepare students to engage in similar enterprises with competence in the workplaces of the future. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.
Author Keywords
Index Keywords
