Student Engagement in Science and User-Centered Engineering

Abstract

Student engagement is a central concept for educational practitioners, researchers, and evaluators, both as its own outcome and as connected with motivation, achievement, attainment, careers, and civic participation. In science and engineering education, young adolescence is a period when many students become disaffected or disengaged, especially when youths’ racial and ethnic, cultural and linguistic, and gender identities are not sustained through educational designs and implementations. Since a reemergence in the 1980’s, scholarship has approached student engagement in either individualistic or collectivist ways, with more hybrid and holistic models only recently emerging. In particular, more work is needed to explore whether social engagement is its own distinct dimension, or whether it intersects with dimensions like affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement. This three-paper dissertation takes a philosophical lens of dialectical pluralism to interrelate multiple worldviews when examining student engagement, during an in-school-time invention project and an out-of-school-time invention camp. Adopting the methodology of a cultural psychology approach to design-based research, the study first considers the project and camp separately, then culminates in a cross-case comparison of the two. All papers are situated in “Mills City Public Schools”, a semi-urban district in the Northeast US. The first paper considers the second iteration of an insulating-device project with grade seven students. The second paper explores the second annual “Winter Vacation Camp” with grades six-eight campers inventing electronic doors. The third paper compares those two interventions, in a manner targeted towards educational practitioners. In sum, the paper-set provides qualitative, quantitative, and integrated evidence that a six-dimensional model is conceptually warranted and practically useful, through examples at the individual, small-group, and classroom/camp levels. Further, it provides educational design considerations for both in- and out-of-school time learning environments. The new model and design considerations support planning and analysis for more equitable engagement of youth, especially those with identities historically minoritized in science and engineering education.