2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Current national policy documents in the United States call upon the integration of engineering design tasks in K–12 classrooms as a way to support children’s understanding and knowledge of concepts and practices unique to the field. However, the difficulties in implementing engineering design tasks in such settings may include a lack of time, as well as a lack of content knowledge and misconceptions of engineering by educators. As a way to support children’s knowledge construction and meaning-making of engineering in school settings, we promote the home environment as another potential learning site. Therefore, in this exploratory study, we examined the following research question: How do children and their families participate in epistemic practices of engineers within engineering design tasks in their home environment? We utilized Cunningham and Kelly’s (2017) 16 epistemic practices of engineering for K–12 education contexts to analyze video data from nine families, with a child in grades 2–5 who completed researcher-developed design tasks in their home. We analyzed the video data independently before meeting to discuss agreements and disagreements within each video. Results highlighted how children participated in a variety of interlocking or connected epistemic practices, both with and without the support of their family. Broadly, children continued to develop and refine their prototype through the act of testing-making evidence-based decisions-persisting in the face of failure. Children were less likely to generate or envision new solutions but grounded their change in observations. In addition, different tasks seemed to inform participation in different engineering tasks such as Consider Problems in Context and Apply Science Knowledge. The significance of this study lies in its potential to engage young children (and parents) in the knowledge construction and sense-making of engineering similar to that of professionals in the field (i.e., epistemic practices). Further, it can inform the design of engineering tasks to support the development of children’s epistemic practices in engineering within out-of-school contexts.