The Role of Register Features of Description and Explanation to Support Students' Reasoning as They Engage in Engineering Design

• In Event: 45.027 - Supporting Elementary and Middle School Students to Write Scientific Explanations

Abstract

Purpose
In keeping with calls for extending STEM learning to the elementary grades, this poster investigates the teaching of engineering to fourth and fifth grade students in an urban school. Engineering is a design-based discipline that requires collaborative, divergent, problem-focused thinking, as well as informed, reflective decision-making during iterative cycles of planning, testing, and redesign (Authors, 2017; Dym et al., 2005). Engineering demands a “mechanical reasoning” which involves not only causes and effects, but also the processes underlying how a mechanism works (Russ, Scherr, Hammer, & Mikeska, 2008).

Theoretical Framework
This design-based study (Cobb et al., 2003) is framed by disciplinary literacies (Fang, 2012) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2008). A focus on simultaneous language and concept development is key for supporting students as they build both academic language and ideas as apprentice engineers (Authors, 2018; Authors, 2016). Two genre families characteristic of science and engineering are reports (description and classification of phenomena) and explanations (how processes happen, relation of causes and effects) (Martin & Rose, 2008).

Methods and Data Sources
Data were collected from combined fourth/fifth grade engineering teams and investigated the question, “How can instruction in register features of description and explanation support students’ reasoning as they engage in the engineering design cycle?” Data from three engineering units included: team and individual writing samples, transcriptions of whole class instruction, student interviews, and teacher/researcher meetings. Analysis from the first unit informed the development of two writing rubrics, one for functional language features (Brisk, 2015; Martin & Rose, 2008) and one for mechanistic reasoning (Russ et al., 2008). Next, eight team writing samples from the second unit (rocket design) and thirty-three individual samples from the third unit (plant package design) were then coded and analyzed using the rubrics.

Results
Writing samples addressed connections between students’ reasoning about their prototypes and their use of language to realize that reasoning. An integrated focus on functional grammar and mechanical reasoning increased expectations for writing clear descriptions and explanations. This in turn, encouraged students to pay attention and reason about success and failure of prototype features. Examining mentor texts for language features of description and causal explanations resulted in writers’ refocusing on prototype rather than writing personal recounts, increased precision in describing the materials and properties, and the beginnings of abstract relations between entities and processes.

Significance
After the intervention, there remained variability that ranged from inaccurate reasoning, partial reasoning, strong reasoning, and exemplary reasoning. This variability suggests further investigation of the writing development across oral, visual, and written literacy practices. (Brisk, 2015; Christie & Derewianka, 2010; Lee, 2017).

Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a grant (#1316762) from the National Science Foundation. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the National Science Foundation.

Authors

• Patricia C. Paugh, University of Massachusetts - Boston

• Kristen Wendell, Tufts University