2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Mechanistic reasoning is an approach to explaining a phenomenon by identifying its entities and their properties, activities, and underlying cause-effect relationships. Information about how pre-college students reason mechanistically about their own engineering designs could improve educators’ capacity to help students deepen their understanding of how and why a design functions as it does. Therefore, we ask: how do elementary students use mechanistic reasoning when describing and explaining their design prototypes at the conclusion of five different community-connected engineering units?

For this qualitative descriptive study, we focus on interview data collected after each of five community-connected curriculum units: accessible playground design (3rd grade, N = 8), displaced animal relocation design (3rd grade, N = 10), migration stopover site design (4th grade, N = 4), retaining wall design (4th grade, N = 13), and water filter design (5th grade, N = 9 students).

The findings showed that (as aspects of mechanistic reasoning) linking up to performance and connecting entity factors occurred less often than naming entities and describing entity factors. Students may have linked up to the overall design performance more consistently after the water filters, retaining walls, and stopover sites units because testing of prototypes occurred frequently and at discrete moments in time for these units. Students may have connected entity factors most consistently in the water filter and retaining wall units because the community contextualized design challenges in those units focused on concrete interaction with specific elements of the natural environment – water or sand.