Kids and Science
Motivated and confident to begin with, they learn more through design challenges.
By Kristen B. Wendell and Chris Rogers
The recently adopted Common Core State Standards have set high expectations for K-12 math and literacy learning across the United States. Their science education equivalent is the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Developed by 26 states in partnership with expert panels of scientists and engineers, and unveiled in 2013, the NGSS represent America’s first new set of national K-12 science-education standards since 1996. Unlike previous frameworks, however, the NGSS not only include but elevate engineering design “to the same level as scientific inquiry in science classroom instruction at all levels” – even in grades K to 5.
The NGSS establish performance expectations. They are not a curriculum, nor do they prescribe one, and much work remains to realize their potential. Still, their focus on engineering represents an opportunity as well as a challenge for the engineering education community. Ideally, engineering educators will collaborate with science educators to incorporate engineering into K-12 experiences in ways that meaningfully reflect the engineering enterprise but do not detract from students’ opportunities to learn and enjoy science.
To implement the NGSS, teachers could pose engineering design problems as contexts for building science knowledge. In the 1990s, for example, Janet Kolodner and her team at Georgia Tech began the Learning By Design program, which successfully set middle school science instruction within design-and-build challenges such as miniature vehicle propulsion and erosion management.
Anticipating the movement to include engineering in science education standards for all grades, our research team at Tufts University and Boston College studied whether a design-based science learning approach would work at the elementary school level. We also wanted to explore the reasons for its success or failure. Students who use design-based science curricula could have more positive attitudes toward science because of the hands-on nature of design challenges, and their improved motivation or confidence could explain their science-learning gains.
To explore this hypothesis, we developed Science Through LEGO Engineering curriculum units on properties of materials and objects, simple machines, sound, and animal adaptations. Each unit begins by asking students to consider how they might solve a particular engineering design challenge – for example, create a stable and insulated model house. It then guides them through science investigations to build knowledge and skills for tackling the design challenge, and supports them in applying that learning to design, build, and test a prototype solution out of LEGO components. In Year 1, third- and fourth-grade students of 12 teachers in eight schools studied the four science topics using their school’s existing science curriculum. In Year 2, the same 12 teachers taught the same science topics to similar students but with the new LEGO Engineering curriculum. We used paper-and-pencil tests and surveys to measure students’ science content knowledge and attitudes before and after instruction with both curricula.
We found that science content knowledge improved more (ranging from 0.23 to 1.12 standard deviations) for the students who used the LEGO Engineering curriculum than for those who used their school’s existing science curriculum. We also found no significant difference in science confidence (feeling “good” at science) or science motivation (wanting to “do” science) between the two groups of students.
This combination of findings suggests that improvements in science-learning outcomes during engineering-based science instruction are not explained by an “attitude adjustment” among students. Elementary students have positive science confidence and motivation before and after instruction, whether their teachers use design-based or other approaches. Other factors must have supported the LEGO Engineering students in learning science content while completing engineering design challenges. Determining the mechanisms by which students learn science through engineering is an important next step for researchers in engineering education.
Kristen B. Wendell is an assistant professor of science education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Chris Rogers is a professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach at Tufts University. This article is based on “Engineering Design-Based Science, Science Content Performance, and Science Attitudes in Elementary School” in the October 2013 issue of the Journal of Engineering Education. The work was supported by NSF grant DRL0633952 and was conducted in collaboration with Linda Jarvin, Kathleen Connolly, Christopher Wright, Michael Barnett, and Ismail Marulcu.