Student Understanding of the Engineering Design Process Using Challenge Based Learning.

this study conducted in a large metropolitan city, teachers introduced and implemented CBL in the curriculum. One research objective of the study was to teach middle and high school students the engineering design process (EDP) while solving a real world challenge using Challenge Based Learning (CBL). The EDP is the formulation of a plan to help an engineer build a product or formulate a process with a specified performance goal. Because there are performance characteristics as well as constraints, there will typically be a variety of potential solutions. EDP involves a number of steps, and parts of the process may need to be repeated many times before production of a final product can begin. Students were asked to draw their understanding of the EDP at the conclusion of the CBL curricular Unit. Specifically, we observed the nature of students' misconceptions and the effects CBL pedagogy has on conceptual understanding of the EDP. For assessment the important elements of EDP are: 1. Correct terms are used 2. Terms are connected to each other 3. Terms are connected to each other in the correct order 4. Cyclical Representation of EDP is identified At the end of a CBL-EDP curricular Unit taught by a teacher, students were asked to complete a questionnaire which included a question asking them to illustrate their understanding of the way they implemented EDP in the Unit through a drawing. These drawings were interpreted for the elements listed above. To date, a four person team of trained scorers used a rubric to score EDP drawings from 6 out of 34 teachers (17.6%); this included 518 EDP drawings out of 4545 received (11.4%). Individual teachers had differing numbers of students in their classes. The four scorers had three training sessions and two scorers rated each drawing. In this paper, the training of the raters, the evaluation process used by them to score the EDP drawings made by the students, the results of their findings, and statistical technique used to validate the results are presented and discussed. As discussed later in the paper, our inter-rater reliability was 0.90 - 1.94 using Cronbach Alpha statistic for each pair of raters. Initial rubric scores indicate that the students can identify the steps in the EDP process and understand that they are connected. However, it is found that they are not representing the cyclical nature of EDP and the correct order of the steps. Since these results are a reflection of the teachers' Unit implementation, we will work with the project team and resource team to support professional development for the teachers to improve their CBL and EDP instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]