Engineering design is being increasingly included in elementary education, typically to provide students with opportunities to apply science and mathematics concepts while developing their engineering practices. An important question is how to prepare teachers who can help students develop more informed engineering practices during classroom…

Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded program, adapted hands-on robotics instruction for online delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative multiple case study shares the experiences of participating education students in spring 2021 as they collaborated virtually with engineering students and fifth graders to engineer bioinspired robots…

Research around problem solving in collaborative groups has made progress, but several conceptual and methodological issues remain. These issues include the appropriate choices of units of analysis; the ability of current theoretical sets of macrocognition codes to capture group dynamics; detection and identification of potentially emergent…

Engineering design activities are a common way for teachers to incorporate engineering into their science classrooms, as called for by current science policy documents in the United States. However, little is known about how teachers prioritize different learning objectives during engineering design lessons. Understanding teachers' thinking on…

Background: Students may exhibit growth mindsets, where intelligence is seen as malleable and failures prompt more effort and new approaches, or fixed mindsets, where intelligence is seen as immutable and failures indicate lack of intelligence. One's mindset in general may be different from that for a particular domain such as engineering. Having…

The theme that structure determines function is one of the most significant cornerstones in understanding natural sciences. On the other hand, recently revised science curriculum in Turkey has emphasized science and engineering practices to help students be able to converge science with the other disciplines by applying theory into practice and…

This paper addresses an important consideration for promoting equitable engineering instruction: understanding how teachers contextualize curricular materials to draw upon student and community resources. We present a descriptive case study of two 5th grade teachers who co-designed a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-aligned curricular unit…

When people were forced to isolate themselves physically during the pandemic, many new connections sprung up through the Internet. In order to promote this newfound global oneness and to facilitate global education, this article examines a STEAM activity that promotes a holistic approach to education and make way for a global citizenry as students…

Interactions with forces and energy can range from a toddler dropping toys repeatedly for someone else to pick up to a group of fifth graders playing soccer at recess. In addition, students may have observed the power of water to move physical objects by seeing news footage of rising floodwaters, experimenting with a garden hose, or spending a day…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" framework outlines scientific and engineering practices as a key element of student development. Educators are just beginning to discover effective and meaningful ways to teach science content to students with intellectual disability; however, the literature on teaching science practices is still…

Assessment of students' critical thinking and problem solving in engineering is a real challenge for classroom teachers and researchers. Yet, students demonstrate evidence of learning through multiple means, including written reflections. The purpose of this study was to explore how students in grades 5 and 7 reflect on what they had learned about…

Background: Design thinking, with its emphasis on iterative prototyping and mantra of "fail early and often," stands in stark contrast to the typical one-and-done, failure-averse culture of the classroom. Iterative prototyping and fail-forward mindsets could promote valuable iterative practices and positive reactions to failure, but…

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs serving students from low socioeconomic areas are understudied in the literature. More research studies need to be conducted to make informed instructional decisions for students who may be at a disadvantage compared to their peers from higher socioeconomic areas. The purpose of…

In this study, we present a case for designing expansive science learning environments in relation to neoliberal instantiations of standards-based implementation projects in education. Using ethnographic and design-based research methods, we examine how the design of coordinated learning across settings can engage youth from non-dominant…

In this article, the authors provide an overview of engineering and the engineering design process, and describe the steps they took to develop a fifth grade-level, standards-based engineering design task titled "Getting the Dirt on Decomposition." Their main goal was to focus more on modeling the discrete steps they took to create and…