Drawing on the work of Lee Shulman, this article reviews literature exploring the concept of signasture pedagogies, which are described as having have surface, deep and implicit structures. These structures are complex and changing; concerned with habits of head, hand and heart. Emerging from professional education and now being explored in STEM…

Human-centered design is of growing importance for professional designers and in the past two decades a series of techniques for designers to develop understanding of and empathy with a diversity of users has been developed within this field. In the second half of the twentieth century, intended users were involved late in the design process, i.e.…

This study explores how theoretical elements of design knowledge relate to notions of creativity found in literature. The results of this exploration are further applied to analyze four different cross-curricular design and technology projects in Norwegian primary and lower secondary school. All of the school projects examined were intended to be…

Many scholars claimed the integration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education is beneficial to the national economy and teachers and institutes have been working to develop integrated education programs. This study examined a project-based learning (PjBL) activity that integrated STEM using survey and interview…

The POWERTECH contest in Taiwan was established in an attempt to promote inventiveness and technology to elementary school pupils. The POWERTECH contest is designed as a collaborative learning system for project design. Project design is comprised of technical processes, which include the construction of an artifact and improvement of its…

In a contest featuring hands-on projects, college students were required to design a simple crawling worm using planning, self-monitoring and self-evaluation processes to solve contradictive problems. To enhance the efficiency of problem solving, one needs to practice meta-cognition based on an application of related scientific concepts. The…

In 2007, the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of the Delft University of Technology introduced a new bachelor program. Based on theories of learning and instruction three design principles were used to develop an approach that aims to make it easier for students to bridge the gap between theoretical design engineering courses and practical…

In France, project activities figure predominantly in technology education. The general idea behind learning based on project activity is to allow the pupil to get involved in the activity in question, with the pupil tackling real situations rather than ones of an abstract nature. But too often, we notice that the pedagogical strategies used by…

This paper presents a study about learning and the problem solving process identified among junior high school pupils participating in robotics projects in the Lego Mindstorm environment. The research was guided by the following questions: (1) How do pupils come up with inventive solutions to problems in the context of robotics activities? (2)…

Infusing creative thinking competence through the design process of authentic projects requires not only changing the teaching methods and learning environment, but also adopting new assessment methods, such as portfolio assessment. The participants in this study were 128 high school pupils who have studied MECHATRONICS from 10th to 12th grades…

Future elementary school teachers often lack self-efficacy for teaching science and technology. They are particularly anxious about encouraging children to carry-out student-directed, open-ended scientific inquiry and/or technological design projects. Moreover, because this often also is the case with practising elementary school teachers, it is…

This paper presents an innovative way in which university education can help pre-service teachers become better problem-solvers. The central idea is to use the "Technology Fair" as a means for promoting pre-service teachers pedagogical content knowledge about technological problem solving skills. This innovation is supported with results from a…

The focus of this paper is students' design productions as they engaged in designing and making a windmill model to lift a given weight. This work is part of a project on the development of design and technology (D&T) education units and its trials among Indian middle school students (Grade 6, age 11-14 years) in different socio-cultural…

In this article we report assessment results from two studies in an ongoing design experiment intended to provide a single school system with a sequence of secondary school level (ages 14-18) computer technology courses. In our first study, we share data on students' learning as a function of the required introductory course and their pre-course…

Technology education has long struggled to establish itself as an equal partner in general education and often struggled to gain recognition for the value of its instruction. Frequently technology educators tout the effectiveness of their programs based on anecdotal evidence gathered from their classroom experiences on how their instructional…