Preservice Teachers Noticing About Students’ Written Design Performance and Improvement Ideas (RTP)

Noticing involves teachers identifying important instances of teaching and learning during classroom interactions, connecting those to broader instructional principles, and using them to inform future instruction. To facilitate P-12 students' engagement in engineering design, teachers must notice what students are designing and what they are thinking about their designs. In this qualitative study, we share pre-service teacher (PST) responses to a task that we developed for use in university-level engineering methods courses. The research question that guided our study was: In PSTs' responses to the task, what do PSTs notice about students' first designs and ideas about design performance and improvement? Study participants were 14 PSTs enrolled in an online engineering methods course at one of two college institutions. Our task engaged PSTs in analyzing two sets of student design work, each of which included pre- and post-testing images of the design, design scoring, and written work regarding design performance and improvement. Overall, we found that most PSTs were able to notice how students' written work addressed aspects of the design constraints and criteria. However, few PSTs noticed missing information in the students' written work, including design weaknesses and remedies to address them. Our findings suggest that PSTs need support in noticing what may be omitted from students' designs and design thinking. PST noticing could be enhanced by deepening PSTs' understanding of the design challenge and providing supports to scaffold their analysis.