Duffield EER Institute Seminar: Kristen Wendell (Tufts)

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Recognizing and Supporting Mechanistic Reasoning in Students’ Engineering Design Discourse

To solve engineering design problems, engineering students typically need to make sense of the relationships between parameters of existing systems or of their own prototype designs. One form of sensemaking about designed systems is mechanistic reasoning, which focuses on characterizing the entities and activities that cause a particular system performance. Because successful engineering design often requires teamwork, students need not only to engage in mechanistic reasoning as individual thinkers; they must also express and revise their mechanistic reasoning to fellow learners in-the-moment, during design team conversations.

The goal of our work is to provide the engineering education community with shared language and tools for recognizing and developing students’ mechanistic reasoning, particularly as it occurs in the moment during collaborative engineering learning experiences. Using audio and video recordings of students’ design discourse, we have studied students’ mechanistic reasoning empirically in classroom and homework settings across different design challenge contexts. In this talk, I will describe a five-part framework that can help educators notice and support students’ mechanistic reasoning during engineering design activities.

Students identify the target performance when they articulate the desired overall design goal; they name entities when they recognize specific objects or components that matter to a design; they describe entity factors when they specify the characteristics or actions of those components; they link to performance when they attribute the overall success or failure of a design to a specific entity or factor; and they connect factors when they discuss a causal relationship between different parts of a design or between a component’s characteristics and actions. I will describe classroom examples that show how these elements of mechanistic reasoning contribute to students’ engineering design problem-solving and connect to science and engineering practices. We will consider how educators can foster mechanistic reasoning for engineering, including by facilitating intentional “design-in-progress” whole-class conversations and by posing design challenges in which students’ prototypes interact with the surrounding environment in clearly observable ways.

Bio: Kristen Wendell is professor of mechanical engineering and education and co-director of the Institute for Research on Learning and Instruction at Tufts University. Her research group is based at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach. An NSF PECASE award recipient, she serves as PI and co-PI on NSF-funded projects that investigate curriculum and instructional support for deeper and more inclusive knowledge construction by engineering learners. She is a deputy editor for the Journal of Engineering Education. She teaches courses in design, mechanics, electronics, and engineering education. Wendell holds a Ph.D. in science education from Tufts and B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton and MIT.