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Creation of an Engineering Epistemic Frame for K-12 Students (Fundamental)

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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

Best Practices in Research & Assessment Tools for Pre-College Engineering Education

Tagged Division

Pre-College Engineering Education

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

21

DOI

10.18260/1-2--32562

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/32562

Download Count

721

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Paper Authors

biography

Tamecia R. Jones North Carolina State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-4229-3975

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Tamecia Jones is an assistant professor in Technology, Engineering, and Design program of the STEM Education Department at North Carolina State University College of Education with a research focus on K-12 engineering education, assessment, and informal and formal learning environments. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Purdue University. Originally trained as a biomedical engineer, she spent years in the middle school classroom, teaching math and science, and consulting with nonprofits, museums, and summer programs.

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Abstract

In implementation of K-12 engineering education standards, in addition to the professional development teachers need to be trained to prepare students for future engineering careers, assessments must evolve to reflect the various aspects of engineering. A previous research project investigated documentation methods using a variety of media with rising high school juniors in a summer session of a college preparatory program (author, 2012). That study revealed that although students had design journals, storyboards, and traditional assessments, in situ video recordings captured decisions and evolution of projects differently. To further investigate the potential of ongoing interactions as spaces for demonstrating engineering thinking and ideas, a framework was created to analyze in situ video clips. An epistemic frame (Arastoopour, Chesler, Shaffer, & Swiecki, 2015, June; Chesler et al., 2015; Matwyczuk, 2013; Svarovsky, 2009; Wolf, Doughty, Irving, Sayre, & Caballero, 2014) was developed to capture skills, knowledge, identity, values, and epistemologies of engineering relative to K-12 formal and informal spaces. First, this paper will describe the development of an engineering epistemic frame for K-12 students and its synthesis using literature, local contexts, and national policy directives and its application to one pilot set of data. The frame was applied to video clips to evaluate the kinds of engineering and design knowledge that could be identified and assessed from brainstorm sessions and studio critiques. The video clips of one group project were coded according to the engineering epistemic frame. Results showed that over half of the students displayed all aspects of the engineering epistemic frame, some students displayed many of the elements of the epistemic frame, and three students exhibited no elements of the epistemic frame. In summary, the first version of the engineering epistemic frame was effective for viewing learning in situ, and brainstorm sessions and studio critiques are spaces where knowledge occurs.

Jones, T. R. (2019, June), Creation of an Engineering Epistemic Frame for K-12 Students (Fundamental) Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32562

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