Learning to teach science using engineering design is a complex endeavor for elementary preservice teachers (PSTs). This entails helping PSTs understand students as sense makers and recognizing ways to notice, respond, and leverage their students' ideas throughout the design process. In this study, we follow a cohort of elementary PSTs through a…

The role of engineering in science and mathematics education continues to emerge as a contributing factor to improving STEM education. Efforts across different countries include the integration of engineering in K-12 curriculum, after school programs, and inservice teacher professional development. Only recently have science teacher educators…

The purpose of this study is to profile four university science instructors who utilized action research as a means of learning how to develop and integrate a novel curriculum innovation -- engineering design -- in their science courses. Data included curriculum maps, lesson plans, notes from group meetings, and instructor reflections. Data…

As elementary schools across the U.S. continue to adopt new science education reform, attention is needed to understand how teachers make sense of using engineering design to teach science in their classroom settings. This study examined fourth-grade teachers' sense-making with learning to integrate engineering design-based science instruction and…

This study examines the initial integration of engineering design in an introductory preservice elementary biology content course using a life science design task focused on composting. The task, informed by a three-dimensional learning approach, required preservice teachers to research and model the process and use of composting to help the…

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…

In an effort to document teachers' enactments of new reform in science teaching, valid and scalable measures of science teaching using engineering design are needed. This study describes the development and testing of an approach for documenting and characterizing elementary science teachers' multiday enactments of engineering design-based science…

The adoption of engineering design-based science teaching requires elementary teachers to modify their current science pedagogy, often resulting in tensions or hard choices they must make in their teaching practice. The purpose of this study is to identify, compare, and characterize the tensions faced by 45 grade 3 and grade 4 elementary teachers…

Initiatives to integrate engineering design in the elementary science classroom have become increasingly evident in both national reform documents and classroom practice. Missing from these efforts is a purposeful attempt to capture students' designerly thinking and dialogues as they engage in the process. The purpose of this study was to…

The integration of engineering concepts and practices into elementary science education has become an emerging concern for science educators and practitioners, alike. Moreover, how children, specifically preadolescents (grades 1-5), engage in engineering design-based learning activities may help science educators and researchers learn more about…

This article describes the steps incorporated to teach an engineering design process in a fifth-grade science classroom. The engineering design-based activity was an existing scientific inquiry activity using UV light--detecting beads and purposefully creating a series of engineering design-based challenges around the investigation. The…

In a unique school-university partnership, methods students collaborated with fifth graders to use the engineering design process to build their problem-solving skills. By placing the problem in the context of a client having particular needs, the problem took on a real-world appeal that students found intriguing and inviting. In this article, the…