ECR Projects

Explore past and current fundamental STEM education research projects across the three research areas that NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program funds, as well as across ECR funding types. Other search filters draw from both NSF's data and the ECR Hub's hand coding of award abstracts.

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Examining Factors that Foster Low-Income Latino Middle School Students' Engineering Design Thinking in Literacy-Infused Technology and Engineering Classrooms

Effective Years: 2016-2022

This is a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) proposal responsive to Program Solicitation NSF 15-555. The CAREER program is a National Science Foundation-wide activity that offers the most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research. The project will investigate how literacy-based instructional strategies, as well as contextual factors, mediate the development of engineering design thinking of low-income Latino middle school students, including English learners, as they attend technology and engineering courses. Engineering design thinking will focus on fundamental aspects of this discipline, such as identifying a problem; considering possible solutions; formulating a plan for the solution; developing, implementing, and testing the plan; evaluating results, redesigning the plan, and testing it again. Literacy-based instructional strategies will include comprehension (summarizing, predicting, inferring, and questioning written text); vocabulary (constructing explicit definitions by making connections to their students' background knowledge); writing-to-learn heuristic (identifying a need, defining a problem, generating solutions, testing, observing results, making claims based on empirical evidence, optimizing, and reflecting on how ideas change); and argumentation (thinking and articulating the relationships between claims and evidence). Technology and Engineering courses are based on the application of existing technology within the field of engineering through the use of basic engineering principles and technical skills, while simultaneously addressing national literacy, science, and engineering standards. These courses are designed to acquaint students with the states' labor markets and the employment opportunities for which they can prepare.

The study will focus on three research questions: (1) How do literacy-based instructional strategies mediate the development of engineering design thinking?; (2) How do features of technology and engineering classroom settings seem to support students' literacy and engineering design?; and (3) How do contextual factors appear to afford or constrain middle school technology and engineering teachers' use of literacy-based instructional strategies? Employing a staggered design-based research and its iterative cycle of design, implementation, and retrospective analysis; the project will work with (a) 10 urban and rural middle schools, (b) 10 teachers who teach mandatory technology and engineering courses, (c) 22 classrooms, and (d) 660 students over the course of 7 trimesters, as they integrate engineering design and literacy. Each classroom will be organized in small groups (pairs of students) representative of English language proficiencies (e.g., English learners at different proficiency levels; non-English learners) to promote cooperative learning, facilitate the implementation of the literacy strategies, and trace evidence of conceptual change in the context of engineering thinking. Data gathering strategies will include classroom observations, video- and audio-taped of pairs working, pre- and post-surveys, and interviews with students and teachers. Data interpretation strategies will include retrospective analysis, microgenetic learning analysis, within-case analysis, cross-case analysis, and constant comparative analysis to identify the features of the technology and engineering classroom settings that support students' engagement with literacy. Case studies will result in contextualized profiles of student learning in particular learning environments, suitable for identifying the consequences attributable to the treatments and describing the mechanisms and conditions under which these relationships occur within the target population. The key outcome of the proposed study will be a literacy-infused engineering design, research-based and field-tested model of instruction for middle school Latino students, potentially adaptable in other similar settings. A four-member advisory board with expertise in engineering, engineering design, and literacy instruction will oversee the work annually and assess completed tasks. An external researcher will be responsible for the formative and summative evaluation of the project.