2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress (WIP) seeks to explore the ways that two graduate student researchers conceive and refine design research practices with K-12 educators and students as part of engineering education research methodology repertoires. Graduate student researchers interested in K-12 engineering education engage with many knowledge sources, practices, and methodologies that inform how they design and conduct research and their future orientations in the discipline. Both graduate student researchers co-designed with the end user to develop projects or products [1]. Graduate student researchers in engineering education constantly design research studies, tools, and environments with their advisors, peers, and other researchers. However, opportunities to co-design engineering projects with learners and educators are less common for engineering education graduate students. Yet the work that graduate student researchers develop can influence K-12 educators and students and vice versa. Thus, graduate student researchers must have experience working with learners and educators during the research and design process to optimize the products/experiences they develop. More research is needed about how graduate student researchers develop their design-based research practices.

In this double autoethnography [2][3], we study how we, two engineering education graduate research assistants, refined how we designed culturally sustaining [4] engineering education workshops with K-12 educators and students. The data include notes from research design meetings, field notes of observations conducted in respective projects, and notes from conversations between the authors. We analyze how our conceptualizations of design-based research practices changed as we co-designed, iterated, and implemented our respective studies [5]. One study focused on K-12 teachers co-designing creative machine learning (ML) activities with researchers using novel technologies for a summer workshop. The second design-based study focused on hip-hop culture and practices as a culturally sustaining context to engage middle school youth in engineering and computational making [6]; researchers designed a summer workshop for middle schoolers with high school mentors. We have identified three preliminary themes within our shared experiences refining our design-based research methods: 1) we have taken multiple roles, 2) conversations with our participants and advisors are a tool for refinement, and 3) we build and learn to maintain a community around our work. As a key member in research groups and future researchers and educators of engineering education, more information about how graduate students refine their concepts of research methods and practices, especially those designed with K-12 educators and students.