Exploring How Design Critique Processes Shape Fifth Graders' Peer Interaction in Collaborative Engineering Projects

摘要

The purpose of this naturalistic qualitative study is to explore how public design critique processes shaped fifth grade students' peer interaction during collaborative work sessions. Understanding social processes through which young students learn to engage in collaborative engineering design projects is critical as engineering standards become prevalent in K-12 curriculums. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) require that students not only understand core concepts and cross-cutting ideas associated with engineering, but also learn to participate in engineering practices. According to the NGSS, engineering practices are highly social, requiring collaboration and communication with diverse people for multiple purposes. Although it is well-known that communication plays critical roles in the design process, systematic studies of children's peer-to-peer interaction during collaborative design activity are rare (but see). Furthermore, engineering design requires the ability to communicate with people outside the design team, but few studies consider the influence of the broader social context on peer collaboration (but see).