Navigating "the Dip": Preparing Students for the Emotional Work of STEM Through Engneering Tasks

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 37
  In Roundtable Session: Learning and Engagement Through STEM

Abstract

Through discourse analysis, the present study explored how elementary teachers addressed the emotional difficulty inherent in open-ended engineering tasks. Inductive analysis of video data revealed that few teachers explicitly address this difficulty with students, although they seem to adjust both curricula and instructional practices in order to protect students from emotional difficulty. Further analyses of teacher-student interactions suggest that whether teachers explicitly or implicitly acknowledge potential emotional difficulties reflects the power models with which they operate, influencing how they position students relative to engineering. Training teachers to explicitly prepare students for emotional difficulty (frustration, anger, doubt) may be key to increasing students’ STEM engagement, motivation, achievement, and persistence, as well as ability to engage in open-ended problem solving.

Authors

• Jasmine Joy Welch-Ptak, The University of Texas - Austin

• Rebecca M. Callahan, The University of Texas - Austin