Students who exhibited agency, but not framing agency, made decisions that foregrounded accuracy and efficiency at the expense of exploring tentative ideas, and tended to treat the more » problem as having a single right answer. ![]() Students who exhibited framing agency tended to adopt a learning rather than task-completion orientation. Analysis suggests that framing agency is commonly shared across participants and tentative in nature early in the design process. All students exhibited agency in some form, but not all exhibited framing agency. ![]() We also identified learning versus task-completion orientations. We adapted a functional linguistics tool to identify markers of agency in students’ design discourse, comparing and contrasting the cases to illuminate the nuances of framing agency. Teams were audio/video recorded during their design process. We employed a multi-case study design, selecting cases of student design teams across different sites and levels, all in undergraduate engineering courses. Here we introduce and characterize the construct, framing agency, which involves taking up opportunities to make consequential decisions about design problems and how to proceed in learning and developing solutions. To make course-based, undergraduate design projects more manageable, instructors often reduce or remove the open-ended quality, which in turn limits opportunities for students to learn to frame design problems. Tentative language, personal pronouns, and sharing ownership.Ĭonclusions: Framing agency clarifies the kinds of learning experiences students need in order to overcome past experiences dominated by solving archetypical well-structured problems with predetermined solutions. We identified markers of agency in students’ discourse, including more » Results: All teams faced impasses one team navigated the impasse by framing the problem, whereas the others treated the problem as given. For this paper, we analyzed three cases using sociolinguistic content analysis to characterize framing agency and compared the cases to illuminate the nuances of framing agency. Data included audio and video records of design team meetings over the course of framing and solving industry-sponsored problems. Method: Data were collected through extended participant observation of a capstone design course in a biomedical engineering program at a large research university. Using the construct framing agency, we sought to characterize design team discourse to detect whether students treated design problems as ill- or well-structured and examine the consequences of this treatment. Purpose: Framing agency-defined as making decisions that are consequential to framing design problems and learning through this process-sheds light on students’ treatment of design problems by framing, we mean the various actions designers take to understand, define, and bound the problem. ![]() Background: Because of prior experience solving well-structured problems that have single, correct answers, students often struggle to direct their own design work and may not understand the need to frame ill-structured design problems.
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