What Counts as "Disciplinary" Engagement? The Case of Design in Science and Engineering

• In Event: 14.014 - A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation About Productive Disciplinary Engagement

Abstract

We will briefly describe our investigations of PDE in design tasks across two disciplines (environmental science and chemical engineering) at different levels of expertise (high school, college, expert). We will raise questions about what counts as “disciplinary” engagement across levels of expertise. In their initial work on PDE, Engle and Conant (2002) described elementary students pursuing taxonomic investigation as “both disciplinary and productive.” They asserted that there was sufficient “contact between what students are doing and the issues and practices of a discipline’s discourse (p. 402),” in that they were attuned to the need for claims to be supported by evidence appropriate for biological claims about classification. Much PDE subsequent work focuses using disciplinary norms for argumentation.

Design is also disciplinary activity in STEM, central to engineering and increasingly popular in science education. We applied the PDE framework to design projects in environmental science and engineering to understand the kinds of thinking promoted when students were in PDE. To do this, we made decisions about what “counts” as disciplinary engagement in those fields at different levels of expertise. The generic elements of claims and evidence were included, but we expanded the definitions to include problem-scoping, modeling of phenomena, and strategy construction through the use of critique (Ford, 2008) and appropriation of principles and practices specific to each discipline.

We draw on discourse analyses of student teams interacting in two complex STEM contexts: A project-based high school environmental education course (designing a sustainable farm) and a capstone chemical engineering course (designing a process step for the high-volume manufacture of computer chips) completed by engineering undergraduates and practicing engineers. Data sources were video or audio records of teams and instructors, field notes and work products. Audio/video records were transcribed, divided into episodes, and on-task episodes were coded all-PDE (all engaged in disciplinary activity for entire episode), no-PDE (on-task but not disciplinary), and partial-PDE (split episode or part of group engaged). Episodes were coded for the nature of disciplinary activity and for the four elements posited to support PDE: problematizing, authority, accountability, and resources.

We found similar types of design thinking across disciplines and levels. In PDE, groups collaboratively problem-scoped and co-constructed models and strategies. At all levels, participants used discipline-specific principles and practices, especially in holding each other accountable to design constraints, disciplinary norms, and nature (i.e., specific obtained or modeled results of their design). However, our definitions of “disciplinary” were challenged, especially comparing beginners (high schoolers) and advanced novices (undergraduates). Often, disciplinary moves of high schoolers were rudimentary; PDE was more often disrupted by lack of knowledge with which to act in disciplinary ways. At both levels, instructor’s roles were critical to maintaining PDE, providing some scaffolding (resources) along with accountability to balance the authority of students to design.

This work provides clear evidence supporting extending the PDE framework to design tasks and across disciplines. It raises questions about what counts as “disciplinary,” especially in regards to beginners in a discipline, which we plan to discuss with others in the symposium.

Authors

• Susan B. Nolen, University of Washington - Seattle

• Milo D Koretsky, Oregon State University