3

Starting Strong with Investigation and Design

Instruction anchored in science investigations and engineering design can make learning more lasting and meaningful. You’ve probably used some type of investigations in your own science teaching, and you may have engaged students in some form of design work. But what do these concepts mean in the context of three-dimensional learning? What do investigation and design look like in preschool and elementary school learning environments? How can you structure investigations and design tasks to not only engage and motivate all students but guide them to understand and use disciplinary core ideas and key practices of science and engineering? And how can you craft classroom experiences that advance equity and justice?

This chapter explains how you can get off to a strong start in centering instruction on investigation and design, an idea that we will continue to develop in later chapters.

What do investigation and design look like?

As used in this guide and in the National Academies’ education work, investigation is associated with science and design with engineering, although the processes have much in common.

Distinguishing between investigation and design

Investigation is a process used to understand the world and develop new knowledge. In instruction for three-dimensional learning, an effective science investigation starts with and is anchored in an engaging phenomenon—an observable circumstance, event, or process in the natural or human-made world that can be investigated and explained using scientific practices and ideas. Children’s desire to make sense of the phenomenon drives the investigation.

Engineering design aims to develop or improve an object, system, or technique in order to solve a human problem or meet a need. This is accomplished by using practices employed by engineers and an understanding of science. In an instructional setting, effective engineering design is grounded in solving problems that children feel are important and interesting to them.

The role of scientific and engineering practices in investigation and design

As students undertake investigation and design work, they use the eight science and engineering practices laid out in the National Academies’ A Framework for K–12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas:¹

• Asking questions (for science) and defining problems (for engineering)
• Planning and carrying out investigations
• Developing and using models
• Analyzing and interpreting data
• Using mathematics and computational thinking
• Constructing explanations (for science) and designing solutions (for engineering)
• Engaging in argument from evidence
• Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information

Note that engineering design is distinct from science investigation in its application of some of the practices listed above. Since engineering aims to find practical solutions to particular human problems and needs, identifying and defining the problem is key. Students must test and refine their designs in light of the needs and perspectives of end-users. They must also balance various tradeoffs and consider social, cultural, and environmental impacts of their designs.

The eight practices listed above, which constitute the first dimension of three-dimensional learning, seldom proceed in a strict, linear way. They may be done in varying order and any combination. In a particular investigation or design task, some practices may be used more than others. Most importantly, both investigation and engineering design are iterative, meaning that some of these practices are repeated

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¹ National Research Council. (2012). A framework for K–12 science education: Practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13165

but modified based on what’s been learned and that possible explanations or solutions are continually refined to reflect new data and information. This flexible approach to using science and engineering practices contrasts with some forms of traditional instruction that direct students to follow a precise, step-by-step “scientific method” in their investigations, based on a flawed interpretation of how real scientists work.

Students’ use of practices will become more sophisticated over time depending on both experience and age. Each practice can look very different in a first-grade classroom than in a fifth-grade classroom. For example, when first graders use mathematics to analyze data, they may count totals and look for simple patterns, while fifth graders might measure, calculate, and graph changes in area or volume over time.

Effective instruction centered on investigation and design is also purposeful. Children engage in the practices listed above not only to experience the delights and satisfaction of working as scientists and engineers do, but also for a clear purpose—to construct new knowledge and be able to use their growing knowledge to answer questions and solve problems. Each investigation or design task will integrate crosscutting concepts (dimension 2) and core science or engineering ideas (dimension 3).

Thus, instruction anchored in investigation and design entails much more than hands-on learning, which has become a sort of mantra for science education. To be fruitful, investigations and design tasks must activate children’s minds as well as their hands.

In addition, both investigation and design are social endeavors. Much of the work, including the eight practices, is done collaboratively. Even work done individually builds on the contributions of others and in turn contributes to group knowledge.

What does meaningful investigation look like in preschool and elementary settings?

To introduce what an investigation of a phenomenon looks like in the classroom, let’s consider the case of Kellen Kearney, a first-grade teacher. Ms. Kearney uses an actual, unexpected event to pique children’s curiosity about a phenomenon. This leads to a series of investigations that grow out of children’s questions and observations. Notice how the investigations are designed with students’ input and carried out by students, but with astute questioning, guidance, and planning by the teacher.

What is sensemaking in science and engineering?

Investigation and design provide opportunities for children to pursue their own questions and actively reflect on the evidence they are gathering. This process is often referred to as “sensemaking.” As students engage in sensemaking, they actively try to figure out how the world works or how to design or alter things to solve problems. They also take on greater responsibility for developing their own knowledge and arriving at their own explanations and solutions. As a teacher, you assume the vital role of planning, guiding, and supporting them in this process.

Sensemaking happens in the minds of learners as they wonder about and interact with the natural or designed world. Children are engaging in sensemaking when they do actions like these:

• Ask more sophisticated or more targeted questions as learning progresses
• Formulate and express their initial ideas about a phenomenon or design problem by talking, writing, gesturing, drawing and/or making models
• Make predictions about what might happen next
• Analyze data from investigations and design tasks and consider how this data and other evidence confirms or contradicts their initial ideas
• Share and explain their ideas and critique the ideas of others using evidence
• Revise their initial ideas and fill in gaps in their knowledge based on new evidence in individual and collaborative work

Engaging in sensemaking does not require students to do all of these things at once. Nor do these actions need to occur in a specified order. Sensemaking may also

look very different depending on children’s ages. For example, a four-year-old and an 11-year-old observing melting ice may generate very different questions and explanations, but both children can be actively engaged in making sense of the phenomenon.

Reflection and iteration are also key to sensemaking. As children investigate, they may realize they need different types of data or an additional investigation to answer their questions, so they revise their plans. As new data emerges, children need opportunities to refine their models, initial explanations, and solutions to reflect changes in their thinking. By making these kinds of revisions, children are acknowledging that their previous ideas were incomplete and are actively reconstructing knowledge—which they may need to do multiple times. Revision allows children to move past the goal of finding the “right” answer. Children begin to expect their science and engineering knowledge to grow and change over time.

Students are unlikely to be invited or engaged to do this kind of robust intellectual work if they’re taught science with traditional methods and scripted experiments. An effective way to foster the aspects of sensemaking is to engage students in authentic science and engineering practices. As you work out a viable set of strategies and supports to help students engage in sensemaking, you will be rewarded by the vision of students doing vigorous “minds-on” work and becoming competent with science and engineering practices.

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³ Group interview, Jan. 27, 2022.

Sensemaking as a collaborative process

Sensemaking thrives when students work and talk together. When children share and defend their ideas with peers and their teacher, they are exposed to different ways of thinking that may cause them to question what they thought they knew. When children investigate and design things in groups, the evidence that emerges from this work may contradict their initial explanations and motivate them to reconsider and revise their own thinking. Their concluding explanations and solutions are stronger because they have been reviewed and refined collaboratively. Chapter 5 describes more detailed strategies for promoting collaboration.

The teacher’s role in sensemaking

Within this interactive, collaborative, and student-driven approach, you’ll need to strike a balance between giving students ownership of their learning and providing sufficient scaffolding and information. For example, as students develop their own questions and make key decisions about investigations, you’ll need to guide their work by asking probing questions and making thought-provoking comments. If an investigation is drifting in an unproductive direction, you may need to ask more calculated questions to get it on track. At other times, you may let them pursue a dead end as a learning experience.

Although these roles may seem daunting at first, various tools and resources may be available to you. Many high-quality curricula provide detailed teachers’ guides for managing investigations and design tasks, along with the specific disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts the units are targeting. Some curricula also come with relevant readings, physical materials for conducting investigations, and tools you can use to guide students’ discussions and collaborative work.

If your district curriculum does not provide these supports, you might collaborate with your colleagues or a school or district science specialist to explore ways to supplement your materials. There are many excellent research-based resources freely available online, but it takes time to find and review them. Working with and sharing among a team can facilitate the process. Also, you can approach the work gradually, making small additions or modifications over time as you become comfortable with the three-dimensional approach.

Even if your school is underequipped for science and engineering education, you can use everyday objects and repurposed items for investigations and engineering design. What matters most is how you use whatever resources you have.

What defines a suitable phenomenon for learning and sensemaking?

Choosing an appropriate phenomenon for children to investigate is a critical aspect of orienting them to investigation and providing opportunities for sensemaking. As noted above, a phenomenon is a circumstance, event, or process that can be observed, investigated, and explained using science practices. Often, a series of lessons across a unit will begin by introducing an anchoring phenomenon that motivates children to wonder and ask questions. Students then engage in a series of investigations that are related to and help them understand the anchoring phenomenon. For example, as in the case of the “too loud” classroom, the anchoring phenomenon was that the children could be heard by students in a neighboring classroom. The teacher then engaged students in investigations that helped them explore why that might be happening.

Researchers, experienced teachers, and other instructional experts have identified key characteristics that can help you choose phenomena that might work for your students and learning context. These characteristics are summarized in Box 3-1 and

explained after the box. (Characteristics of effective design problems will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter.)

Interesting and puzzling to children

As described in Chapter 2, children are naturally curious from an early age about how the world works. When they encounter a thing or event that they don’t understand, they want to figure it out. An effective phenomenon is puzzling or counterintuitive to children. It activates their curiosity and desire to understand, motivating them to ask questions that set the stage for sensemaking. Here are a few examples of interesting phenomena:

• Community: One area of our town is prone to flooding, while other areas are not.
• Family life: Dario’s family’s apartment on the fourth floor of the building is much warmer than Min’s on the first floor.
• Everyday experience: When I put ice in any drink, the ice always pops to the top.

Relevant to children’s lives

A phenomenon for investigation doesn’t have to be flashy. Often the phenomena that interest children the most are those that connect with their families, classroom, or community. When children pursue their own questions and issues that matter to their lives, investigation becomes meaningful. They are more inspired to work over multiple periods to try to explain the phenomenon.

Using relevant phenomena is an especially important way to connect with children’s cultural and language backgrounds and geographic location. For example, if you’re teaching a group of urban kindergarteners about how sunlight warms the surface of the Earth, you might choose to have them observe hot concrete instead of hot sand.⁴ If you’re exploring ecosystems, you might choose a desert landscape if your school is in Arizona, whereas you might focus on ocean systems if you’re located in Maine.

Aligned to the ideas and practices children are expected to learn and use

A useful phenomenon can be explained with the disciplinary core ideas that your students are expected to learn and be able to use for their grade span, based on the NGSS or similar state standards. You will benefit from knowing the disciplinary core ideas for your grade, and also from considering what your students learned in a previous grade and will need to learn to be ready for the next grade.

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⁴ Using phenomena in NGSS-designed lessons and units, https://www.nextgenscience.org/resources/phenomena

For example, by the end of grade 5, students are expected to know that animals receive different types of information through their senses, process the information in their brains, and respond to the information in different ways. This idea is best taught not by telling it to students as one of many things they should know about organisms. Instead, you could show your students a soundless video of how several baby shrews safely follow a mother around the terrain outside their burrow by forming a sort of conga line, in which each shrew attaches its teeth to the base of the shrew in front of it.⁶ You could then ask your students what they notice and wonder about this situation. Eventually, you can guide them to thinking about why shrews (which have very poor eyesight) behave in this way.

Can be observed and investigated over multiple lessons using science practices

For preschool and elementary science, appropriate phenomena are occurrences that children can observe themselves. In the case of Ms. Kearney’s class, the children were

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⁵ Presentation at Leadership in Science Administrator Workshop Series, Dec. 15, 2021.

⁶ https://www.baesi.org/phenomena/ and https://thewonderofscience.com/phenomenon/2018/7/5/shrew-caravan

intrigued that students in the other class could hear them even when the door was closed. They then explored making sounds with tools and musical instruments to investigate how the phenomenon might occur. They noticed patterns and tried to use science ideas about vibrations to explain those patterns and what caused them.

Observations can also be made with data, images, texts, and accessible technologies. In the Wonder Farm exploration, for example, preschool children look at two pictures of the same plant taken on different days, say what they notice and wonder, and use a digital app to see how variables like water and sunshine affect plant growth over time.⁷

Further, a suitable phenomenon can be explained using some or all of the eight science and engineering practices listed earlier in this chapter. In Ms. Kearney’s case, the students used such practices as asking questions, carrying out investigations, and constructing explanations.

To be suitable for three-dimensional learning, an anchoring phenomenon should be rich enough to not only spur students to want to investigate but to sustain their explorations and sensemaking efforts over days, weeks, and sometimes months. The anchoring phenomenon is the glue that holds the lessons together. Something that can be solved through a single investigation doesn’t allow for students to apply the full range of practices or develop more sophisticated thinking over time.

Touches upon issues of equity and justice

Phenomena that encourage children to investigate issues of equity and justice can be particularly motivating, especially if they raise issues that affect their local community. It’s also critical that you choose phenomena and engineering design problems that are, or can be made, equitable for all students’ learning. These issues are discussed later in this chapter.

What phenomena are NOT

Even if you adhere to these characteristics of effective phenomena, it can still be tricky to frame a naturally-occurring event in the form of a phenomenon that can be investigated. Phenomena are not questions, concepts, or processes, as indicated in Table 3-1. They are not the activity or the investigation itself.

For example, if you open science class with a question like Why do rivers curve, you miss the critical step of students coming up with their own questions to investigate. And if someone blurts out the correct answer, the reason to investigate becomes

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⁷ Presser, A. L., Kamdar, D., Vidiksis, R., Goldstein, M., Dominguez, X., & Orr, J. (2017, October). Growing plants and minds. Science and Children 55(2), 41–47. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1157157

TABLE 3-1

WHAT ARE AND ARE NOT SUITABLE PHENOMENA FOR SCIENCE INSTRUCTION

Sources: Wil van der Veen, NGSS Planning Guide, Raritan Valley Community College Science Education Institute, Aug. 19, 2021; Stacey van der Veen, presentation at Leadership in Science Administrator Workshop Series, Dec. 15, 2021; Nicole Van Tassel, Science Phenomena for Your NGSS Storylines, https://iexplorescience.com/science-phenomena-for-ngss-storylines/

less compelling. Instead, you might show the class a time-lapse video of changes in the shape of a river over time and ask students what they notice and wonder about.

How can a phenomenon propel an investigation?

An example from an urban Title I school with many emergent multilingual learners shows how a compelling anchoring phenomenon—the large amounts of garbage produced at school, home, and community—can grab students’ interest and drive them to investigate. In the example below, Lily Hamerstrom, a fifth-grade teacher, uses a curriculum that integrates SAIL.⁸ Throughout the unit, students ask questions and investigate. They gather and analyze data as they sort school lunch garbage into categories, study a local landfill, and observe what happens to jars filled with food and non-food materials. Over time, students develop an understanding of targeted disciplinary core ideas in physical and life sciences.

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⁸ https://www.nyusail.org/

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⁹ This example is based on SAIL Research Lab. (n.d.). Webinar and brief 5: A classroom example [Webinar]. New York University. https://www.nyusail.org/webinar-and-brief-5; and interviews with Alison Haas of SAIL, Feb. 24, 2022, and teacher Lily Hamerstrom, Mar. 7, 2022.

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¹⁰ Interview, Mar. 7, 2022.

This example is anchored in a phenomenon that students find relevant to their lives and compelling to figure out. The driving question is not presented to students but emerges from their initial interaction with the phenomenon. Students become invested in explaining what happens to garbage and addressing the problem of garbage in their community.

Now that we’ve explored what makes a suitable phenomenon to drive a science investigation, let’s turn to strong engineering tasks that drive design.

What makes an effective design task?

An engineering design task grows out of a problem, need, or desire. The task asks engineers—in this case, the children you teach—to use their understanding of science to design a model or construct a device or product that solves the problem, meets the need, or fulfills the desire. They might also compare and evaluate different possible solutions.

Effective design tasks for teaching engineering share some of the characteristics of suitable phenomena and also have characteristics particular to learning engineering. These characteristics are summarized in Box 3-2 and explained after the box.

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¹¹ Interview, Feb. 24, 2022.

Clearly defined problems

An effective design task in engineering is clear about the problem (or need or desire) to be addressed. It also defines the factors that form the context for the task, such as constraints on time, materials, and costs; the expectations for how students will collaborate; and the criteria for determining the success of the designs.

This doesn’t mean that you should present students with a fully defined problem and context (although your curriculum may already do aspects of that). Students can benefit from taking on some of this clarifying work for themselves. You can give children space to engage in “problem scoping”—identifying the problem to be solved, the constraints involved, and the criteria for success; gathering more information to learn about the problem; and often redefining the problem once they have more information. Problem scoping gives children valuable practice in asking questions and thinking creatively about problems.

In the following example, fourth graders are inspired by a fictional story to demonstrate their problem-scoping abilities and creativity in a design task.

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¹² This example is drawn from Watkins, J., Spencer, K., & Hammer, D. (2014). Examining young students’ problem scoping in engineering design. Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research 4(1). https://doi.org/10.7771/2157-9288.1082

Interesting and relevant

Like a suitable phenomenon, an effective design task piques children’s curiosity with a problem, need, or desire that interests them. Children tend to be interested in situations that relate to their own experiences, lives, or communities. Engineering can also be fun. You’ve seen how often young children are fascinated by building things and taking them apart, and by figuring out how something works.

For example, one unit in an engineering curriculum for elementary students sparks curiosity and a sense of fun by challenging children to design a hat that is functional.¹³ During the unit, children decide what they want their hat to do—protect their eyes from the sun, keep their head warm, disguise them—and how they will know if it works. They then design and test their hats using only the materials provided.

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¹³ STEM Teaching Tools, Engineering Hats Design Challenge. https://stemteachingtools.org/assets/landscapes/EngineeringHats-Supplemental-File.pdf

Responsive to users and social implications

An effective design task will encourage children to consider potential users and the social implications of the design solution in the planning stages and throughout the design process. You can also create opportunities for children to reflect on user issues and social implications once their designs are completed.

Identifying the needs of potential users of a design can emphasize the human element of engineering design and motivate children to persist. For example, an design task called Help Grandma, offered as part of an afterschool design lab program at the New York Hall of Science, invites children to use everyday materials to invent and build models to solve real-life problems that frustrate grandparents. One option in this task starts with a picture and brief story about a character called Nonna, who pleads, “Help—I keep losing my glasses! I love to read mysteries—but I can’t if I don’t have my glasses!”¹⁴ By creating a narrative that focuses on the needs of family members, the task seeks to deepen the emotional engagement of children, particularly girls, in engineering practices.

Zia, a seven-year-old girl, first sketches a sensor that will seek out Nonna’s lost glasses. But after a museum facilitator observes her work and asks questions that lead her to consider additional aspects of the problem, Zia decides she can sketch and make another invention that will be more fun and convenient. Picking out metal brackets, a rubber band, and other hardware, she then makes a prototype of a “robot glasses fetcher” with “legs” that will bring the glasses back to Nonna. She adds ears and a tail to make it look like a pet.

The social implications of a design, such as accessibility, sustainability, and ethics, are also important. You might encourage children to consider questions like these: Who will be able to access your design and who might have problems with accessibility? Is your design made from materials that are sustainable or harmful to the environment? Who would be helped and harmed by your proposed solution? What are the risks? Although children’s specific designs or models created in class may be constrained by available materials and other factors, these kinds of questions create opportunities for discussions about the impact of engineering design decisions on people, animals, plants, and the environment. These discussions can lead to design tasks ranging from developing a way to safely get rid of an invasive species in a local natural area to designing a cover for a portable wheelchair ramp.¹⁵

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¹⁴ Letourneau, S. M., & Bennett, D. (2020), Using narratives to evoke empathy and support girls’ engagement in engineering, Connected Science Learning, 3(3). https://www.nsta.org/connected-science-learning/connectedscience-learning-july-september-2020/using-narratives-evoke

¹⁵ https://www.teachengineering.org/makerchallenges/view/uof-2493-freewheeling-friction-design-challenge and https://eiestore.com/invasive-species-unit.html

Multiple solutions

Real world problems that an engineer might face are likely to be open-ended. As a result, there will be many ways to solve a design task. An effective design task in the classroom should also have the potential for multiple solutions. Children are often motivated by the opportunity to design their own unique solution. In addition, comparing and discussing different solutions provides a powerful learning opportunity.

One way to encourage multiple solutions is to provide children with different kinds of materials to use in solving a problem. For example, you can guide students in designing the lighting system for a performance during a school dance. Children have access to two different size mirrors along with index cards, craft sticks, binder clips, string, tape, and pipe cleaners. As they work through designing the lighting stage within a cardboard box, they will need to make decisions about how many mirrors to use and the positioning of the mirrors. They will also need to make decisions about whether they will hang, prop, or adhere the mirrors to the box and at what heights within the box. The flexibility within this design task and the opportunity for multiple decisions points allows for a range of solutions to be developed.¹⁶

Scaffolding for planning

The goal of a design task is to help children learn the disciplinary core ideas and practices of engineering. To make that happen, an effective design task begins with a systematic plan for solving the problem—in other words, with an engineering design process. But this doesn’t mean that you present students with a fully fleshed out plan. Rather, your role is to provide scaffolding to help children co-create a plan.

This often involves guiding children in making choices about how they will address the task, what materials they will use in their designs, and how they deal with the constraints and criteria. This planning stage is also a good time to encourage children to think about who will use the designs and what the social implications are. Design tasks often require scientific knowledge to solve successfully, so you may need to provide scaffolding for children to learn and use the necessary science disciplinary core ideas. For example, to design toy cars, children need to understand push and pull; to design a noisemaker, they need to understand how sound is produced—even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re exploring.

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¹⁶ Cunningham, C. M., & Kelly, G. J. (2019). Collective reasoning in elementary engineering education. In E. Manalo (Ed.), Deeper learning, dialogic learning, and critical thinking: Research-based strategies for the classroom (pp. 339–355). Routledge.

Opportunities to create and test designs

An effective engineering design task includes opportunities for children to create and test designs and collect data from their tests that will be used to improve their designs, or to compare and evaluate given solutions. Part of your role is to help children understand that there are multiple ways to successfully solve the problem they have targeted. Children will also need to ensure that their methods of testing will yield information that will allow them to evaluate the design against the predetermined criteria for success. For example, in a task to design a filter to purify dirty water, students need to decide how to determine whether a filter is working.¹⁷ The testing criteria might include how the water looks before and after it is filtered, how long it takes all the water to move through the filter, and whether the filter is reusable.

Opportunities to improve and retest

Like science investigation, engineering design is an iterative process, not a rigid method. Students will need to use data from initial testing and other sources to improve, revise, or redo a design, and then to test the revamped design. The process requires multiple cycles of design, and the order will vary based on the nature of the problem and other factors.

Along the way, some designs will fail. You can help children learn that failure is a constructive part of the design process. Every engineer has experienced and learned from failure. When students analyze why something didn’t work and then take steps to address the flaws in their ideas or design, they are engaging in authentic engineering practices.

Meaningful design problems

You may find it challenging to select meaningful problems for engineering design tasks that are accessible to children and are not too contrived. It’s important for students’ learning to be grounded in situations or problems that people want to change.

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¹⁷ The Dirty Water Project https://www.teachengineering.org/activities/view/cub_environ_lesson06_activity2

TABLE 3-2

WHAT ARE AND ARE NOT EFFECTIVE DESIGN PROBLEMS

Source: Adapted from NextGenScience. (2021). Problems with problems: improving the design of problem-driven science and engineering instruction. WestEd. https://www.nextgenscience.org/sites/default/files/resource/files/Problems%20with%20Problems.pdf

Designing a solution to a meaningful problem is different from designing something for the sake of a competition or a construction project. Table 3-2 provides some suggestions for making the shift to meaningful design problems.

What does engineering design look like in preschool and elementary classrooms?

A unit from an engineering curriculum¹⁸ for preK–8 illustrates how first graders are motivated to take on a problem that many children can relate to—falling asleep in a room shared with another child. This task is designed to help children learn, among other things, that objects can be seen only if light illuminates them and that some materials allow light to pass through them, while others allow only some light through or block out all light.

As you read the case below, notice how the task and the instruction introduce children to core science ideas about light at the same time children are learning to use engineering practices.

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¹⁸ Youth Engineering Solutions https://youthengineeringsolutions.org/curricula/

How can I address equity and justice in investigation and design?

When you center instruction on investigation and design, you are seeking to elicit and expand on the brilliance of all children, including those from differing ethnic, cultural, and language backgrounds, and with different intellectual and physical abilities.

As you organize investigations and design tasks, here are several ways you can actively increase equity and attend to issues of social justice:

• Ensure that phenomena for investigation and problems for design tasks are connected to children’s particular experiences and lives.
• Give students opportunities throughout the learning sequence to ask, answer, and revise questions. Leverage student questions to drive and advance learning.
• Assign competence to a wide range of proficiencies throughout the investigation or design process to affirm children’s identities as doers of science and engineering.
• Value and draw on children’s different cultural or family ways of doing science and communicating their ideas and reasoning.
• Allow, encourage, and value multiple modes of sharing children’s thinking (such as drawing, writing, and talking) and multiple forms of evidence.
• Involve children’s families.
• Use phenomena and design problems that connect with justice in their communities, such as access to green spaces, the health impact of food deserts, or unfair exposure of poor and marginalized communities to environmental contaminants.

How can I center instruction on investigation and design?

The ideas in this chapter are the first steps in anchoring your science and engineering instruction in investigation and design. The next two chapters delve into specific aspects of this type of instruction.

Chapter 4 describes how you can support students as they carry out key aspects of investigation and design. These include planning and conducting investigations and design tasks, analyzing and interpreting data, developing and using models, and constructing explanations. Chapter 5 looks at how you can further children’s collaboration and support productive discussion and other forms of communication.

As you find your own style and rhythm for centering instruction on investigation and design, you’ll see what a powerful approach this can be for teaching and

learning. Children can become so engrossed in what they’re doing that it seems like play, even as you recognize that it’s heading in a productive direction. You can better connect with children and tap into how their minds work. As the lessons progress, you can see how children’s understanding blossoms with your guidance—one of the greatest rewards for a teacher.