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Background: To create design solutions experienced engineering designers engage in expert iterative practice. Researchers find that students struggle to learn this critical engineering design practice, particularly when tackling real-world engineering design problems. Purpose/Hypothesis: To improve our ability to teach iteration, this study contributes (i) a new teaching approach to improve student teams' expert iterative practices, and (ii) provides support to existing frameworks--chiefly the Design Risk Framework--that predict the key metacognitive processes we should support to help students to engage in expert iterative practices in real-world engineering design. Design/Method: In a 3-year design-based research study, we developed a novel approach to teaching students to take on real-world engineering design projects with real clients, users, and contexts to engage in expert iterative practices. Results: Study 1 confirms that student teams struggle to engage in expert iterative practices, even when supported by problem-based learning (PBL) coaching. Study 2 tests our novel approach, Planning-to-Iterate, which uses (i) templates, (ii) guiding questions to help students to define problem and solution elements, and (iii) risk checklists to help student teams to identify risks. We found that student teams using Planning-to-Iterate engaged in more expert iterative practices while receiving less PBL coaching. Conclusions: This work empirically tests a design argument--a theory for a novel teaching approach--that augments PBL coaching and helps students to identify risks and engage in expert iterative practices in engineering design projects.

Authentic project-based learning (APBL) is a highly effective way for instructors to help students learn disciplinary skills, modes of thinking, and collaborative practices by creating solutions to real-world problems for real users and clients. While educational technology innovations can bolster APBL by making a promising but challenging pedagogy more effective, as with many areas of education instructor adoption is slow. Diffusion of innovations theory predicts that instructors will adopt and maintain their use of innovations if innovations are perceived to, and then do, address their challenges. To guide design of future APBL technologies, we interviewed 47 university APBL instructors about their most significant challenges and inductively analyzed the resulting interview transcripts. APBL instructors reported interrelated challenges of: (a) "scoping," sourcing challenges and balancing the needs of the program, students, and clients; (b) "curriculum" preparation, making the curriculum flexible enough for shifting project problems and codify standards to help students understand how to do quality work; (c) providing "assistance" to teams, including monitoring, and delivering assistance; and (d) "coordinating" a range of stakeholders involved in assisting teams, including co-instructors, clients, and students. To support instructor adoption in APBL, educational technology innovators might communicate existing technology, or create technological innovations, that provide: (a) scoping tools for sourcing projects, and forming teams; (b) authoring tools for sharing and remixing of curricular materials; (c) project management tools for team management and monitoring; and (d) coordination software to manage all APBL stakeholders.

Learning communities (LCs) can provide authentic, social learning experiences but require an extensive amount of time and effort to orchestrate, often more than instructors can provide in typical university courses. Extracurricular, undergraduate, student-led learning communities (SLLCs) overcome this cost through volunteer peer-instructors. Unfortunately, LCs theory is based exclusively on teacher-led LCs. Here we ask "what instructional processes emerge in SLLCs?" We conducted a qualitative case study of SLLC student leaders' attempts to teach a project management practice (StandUp) to student innovation teams. We found that instruction in SLLCs takes the form of a bi-directional diffusion process, in which peer-instructors influence students' decisions about what practices to participate in, and students influence peer-instructors' decisions about advocating for practices. Three major findings support the bi-directional diffusion model. First, students' participation in StandUp hinged on whether they saw the practice as valuable with respect to their social, learning, and/or performance goals. Second, peer-instructors struggled to persuade and scaffold students to participate in StandUp. Third, students influenced peer-instructors to stop advocating for StandUp. The bi-directional diffusion model highlights the practical importance of persuading students to participate in the community's practices. The model suggests that we might support peer-instruction by promoting peer-instructors' content knowledge about practices, their persuasion skills, and their motivation to advocate for practices.

To provide the substantial support required for project-based learning (PBL), educators can incorporate professional experts as "design coaches." However, previous work shows barriers incorporating design coaches who can rarely meet face-to-face: (1) communication online is time-consuming, (2) updating coaches online is not perceived as valuable, (3) students do not seek help, (4) coaches are not proactive online and (5) coaches struggle to gain the awareness from student online communications. How might we design socio-technical systems that can incorporate professionals coaching? In a 6-week university PBL product design program with three teams (four members per team) and five coaches, teams met with coaches on campus for 2-hours a week, but otherwise communicated with teams online. We created and tested "StandUp," a system designed to overcome coaching barriers online that: prompts team planning, goal setting and monitoring of progress and displays this information online to coaches. We collected and analyzed interview, observation and log data. We found "StandUp" helped participants overcome coaching barriers by providing students a way to regulate group learning which in turn automatically emailed reports to coaches thereby supporting coach awareness; coach awareness in turn prompted both online coaching and face-to-face coaching. This work provides evidence from one context. Future work should measure learning and explore different regulation scripts.

Since the first descriptions of design research (DR), there have been calls to better define it to increase its rigour. Yet five uncertainties remain: (1) the processes for conducting DR, (2) how DR differs from other forms of research, (3) how DR differs from design, (4) the products of DR, and (5) why DR can answer certain research questions more effectively than other methodologies. To resolve these uncertainties, we define educational design research as a meta-methodology conducted by education researchers to create practical interventions and theoretical design models through a design process of focusing, understanding, defining, conceiving, building, testing, and presenting, that recursively nests other research processes to iteratively search for empirical solutions to practical problems of human learning. By better articulating the logic of DR, researchers can more effectively craft, communicate, replicate, and teach DR as a useful and defensible research methodology.

Design educators have long used studio-based learning environments to create communities of learners to support authentic learning in design. Online social media platforms have enabled the creation of distributed studio networks (DSNs) that link studio-based learning environments into expanded communities of practice and potential networked improvement communities. As learning scientists, we do not adequately understand how to infrastructure learning and resource sharing across distributed studios. In this ethnography of the infrastructure of Design for America, a DSN, we analyzed data from interviews, online communication, and field observations as the organization grew its network of university design studios. We found that Design for America managers faced challenges of providing support and resources to address wide variation in needs across studios. Lacking an existing comprehensive network collaboration platform, managers created a proto-infrastructure to distribute support across studios. By studying their iterative adoption of communication and collaboration tools and organizational routines, we define a unique set of design principles to infrastructure DSNs: (a) surfacing local progress and problems, (b) affective crowding, (c) solution mapping, and (d) help routing. Assembling constellations of tools and designing platforms based on these principles could support learning in and the improvement of DSNs across domains.

Intelligent tutors based on expert systems often struggle to provide formative feedback on complex, ill-defined problems where answers are unknown. Hybrid crowdsourcing systems that combine the intelligence of multiple novices in face-to-face settings might provide an alternate approach for providing intelligent formative feedback. The purpose of this study was to develop empirically grounded design principles for crowdcritique systems that provide intelligent formative feedback on complex, ill-defined problems. In this design research project, we iteratively developed and tested a crowdcritique system through 3 studies of 43 novice problem solvers in 3 formal and informal learning environments. We collected observations, interviews, and surveys and used a grounded theory approach to develop and test socio-technical design principles for crowdcritique systems. The project found that to provide formative feedback on ill-defined problems, crowdcritique systems should provide a combination of technical features including: quick invite tools; formative framing; a public, near-synchronous social media interface; critique scaffolds; "like" system; community hashtags; analysis tools and "to do" lists; along with social practices including: prep/write-first/write-last script and critique training. Such a system creates a dual-channel conversation that increases the volume of quality critique by grounding comments, scaffolding and recording critique, and reducing production blocking. Such a design provides the benefits of both face-to-face critique and computer-support in both formal and informal learning environments while reducing the orchestration burden on instructors.

Design research (DR) promises to simultaneously solve practical problems of education and develop theory to guide future interventions. However, educational DR remains paradigmatically underdeveloped, making it difficult to train new researchers, to agree upon what makes a theoretical contribution, and to promise clear outputs to funders--all of which hinders the accumulation of knowledge. To further the paradigmatic development of educational DR we ask: how do we characterise the practical and theoretical products of DR? We propose that DR products are arguments for how people should learn. The theoretical products are design models in the form of blueprints, design arguments, and mockups, as well as principles and frameworks--all of which help designers create practical products to promote learning in the real world. Furthermore, the products of DR precipitate and build upon theoretical contributions from other fields in the natural sciences and ethics. This understanding of the products of DR strengthens the methodology and allows us to better build theory for solving educational problems.

Supporting learning in online communities is an important direction for the future of human–computer interaction as people increasingly leverage social technologies to support professional growth and development. However, few have studied how people leverage the socio-technical affordances of online informal workplace communities to develop professional skills in the absence of dedicated expert guidance. We draw from theories of apprenticeship to introduce an emergent theory of distributed apprenticeship, which outlines how community expectations of transparency and mutual support allow for instruction to be directed by a distributed network of nonexperts. We develop distributed apprenticeship through a qualitative study of crowdfunding entrepreneurs, where novices leverage social interactions with community members to develop a wide range of entrepreneurial skills. We then generalize distributed apprenticeship to other workplace contexts and provide design implications for online communities where people develop professional skills with minimal dedicated formal guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undergraduate women are more likely than their male peers to leave engineering majors because they do not feel that they belong in the engineering classroom. The growth of university makerspaces provides a potential opportunity to establish new patterns of interactions that provide female students with a sense of community. But we cannot realize this potential to retain female engineering majors, due to our limited understanding of their sense of community in these new university makerspaces. A critical examination of how females experience community within makerspaces through an equity lens is needed to identify what interventions are needed to facilitate the successful participation of a diverse student body. During a 13-month qualitative study, we performed 27 interviews with undergraduate female university engineering students and leaders of university makerspaces and engaged in participant observation of university and independent makerspaces to identify ways to support and limit a sense of community among female students. Our findings inform design principles for university makerspaces to support a sense of community including supporting project assessment, member assessment, perspective taking, signals of approachability, structured help-seeking, and credentialing. Theoretically, we contribute an emergent framework for understanding what mechanisms undergraduate women take into account when evaluating their sense of community in makerspaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation is critical to our economic and social prosperity. Faculty and administrators have undertaken resourceintensive efforts to foster innovation in engineering education, yet we inadequately understand the impact these interventions have on individuals' judgment of their own innovation ability. This exploratory study developed a comprehensive instrument to measure an individual's self-efficacy toward innovation. Creation of the instrument began with a literature review and expert interviews with practitioners and academics specializing in engineering innovation. Subsequent tests with experts (n = 22) and students in engineering innovation (n = 681) were used to provide validity and reliability evidence for an initial set of items. The resulting Innovation Self-Efficacy Measure (ISE) consists of 29-items within 9 clusters: creativity, exploration, iteration, implementation, communication, resourcefulness, synthesis, and vision. Factor loadings revealed through exploratory factor analysis ranged between 0.715-0.899 with reliabilities ranging between a Cronbach's Alpha of 0.743-0.864. Implications for evaluation within engineering education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]