Abstract
Introducing kindergarten children to the engineering design process (EDP) is an important objective of early STEM education. Studies indicate that children often miss the crucial steps of testing and optimising during the EDP and do not persist in making solutions better. The present study explores how children’s goal awareness, self-evaluation ability, domain-specific content knowledge, spatial skills and intelligence relate to their persistence, testing and optimising behaviour and to solution quality. In a standardized procedure, 41 children (4 to 7 years) in Germany worked on an engineering task in the domain of gears. The engineering process was videotaped, children’s testing and optimising, solution quality, goal awareness, self-evaluation, and task persistence were rated with a coding scheme and with interviewer questions. Domain-specific content knowledge, mental rotation ability and figural reasoning were measured with standardized tests. Correlational analyses indicated that goal awareness was positively related to solution quality. However, most children required support by the interviewer to retrieve the goal specifications. Moreover, children’s self-evaluation was negatively related to task persistence. Most children were satisfied with their first solution, even when it did not meet the requirements. Our findings emphasize the important role of teachers in helping children to tackle challenges with the EDP.
Highlights
Scientists and practitioners agree that STEM education should begin as early as kindergarten (e.g., NRC, 2013; OECD, 2018) as it can provide children with a fundamental knowledge base for learning STEM subjects in later school years (Kaderavek et al, 2020)
In recent years, engineering has been increasingly emphasized as a central component of early STEM education (Bustamante et al, 2018; John et al, 2018)
The task can be characterized as a well-defined engineering task since it had a clear goal state, i.e., clearly defined specifications; it demanded goal-oriented thinking under constraints; and it allowed for more than one possible solution
Summary
Scientists and practitioners agree that STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education should begin as early as kindergarten (e.g., NRC, 2013; OECD, 2018) as it can provide children with a fundamental knowledge base for learning STEM subjects in later school years (Kaderavek et al, 2020). The few studies indicate that kindergarteners’ persistence, testing and optimising might be related to the problem type (well- vs illdefined), children’s goal awareness, ability to realistically self-evaluate solutions, and domain-specific content knowledge (Kendall, 2015; Lottero-Perdue and Tomayko, 2020; Strimel et al, 2018a). In a study by Lottero-Perdue and Tomayko (2020) 5- to 7-year-old kindergarten children were able to accurately self-evaluate their engineered solution with respect to the requirements it had to meet, and almost all of the children opted to optimise their design when asked by the researchers. In the present exploratory study, we aim at learning more about how kindergarten children’s persistence, testing and optimising in an engineering task is related to children’s goal awareness, their self-evaluation of the solution, and their domain-specific content knowledge, spatial skills, and fluid intelligence. RQ-7: How are solution quality, testing, optimising, goal awareness, self-evaluation, task persistence, domain-specific content knowledge, spatial skills, and fluid intelligence related? We assume a negative correlation between children’s self-evaluation and their willingness to make changes to their solution
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