2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

During brainstorming, informed designers generate multiple possible ideas to solve a problem. Novice designers may instead fixate on one idea. A goal of preservice teacher (PST) engineering education is to prepare PSTs for instances of idea fixation and learn to respond in a way that supports students’ opportunities to engage in the brainstorming process as informed designers. However, brainstorming is understudied within the pre-college engineering education literature.

Previously, we developed a simulation scenario for PSTs to practice facilitating a discussion with a student avatar experiencing idea fixation. The student avatar, Savannah, is in the Mursion® middle school simulated classroom. She is fixated on one idea for a wind turbine design challenge. (Savannah is played by a trained human actor; PSTs interact with Savannah through Zoom.) To prepare to facilitate the roughly seven-minute discussion with Savannah, PSTs are provided with information about Savannah, the design challenge, relevant scientific findings, and an image of Savannah’s brainstorming page showing her single idea. The goal of the discussion is to encourage Savannah to share her first idea and encourage her to generate a second.

The research question for the present study is: Prior to PSTs receiving methods instruction about how to support students experiencing idea fixation, what prompts do PSTs use that are likely to support or hinder Savannah’s engagement in brainstorming?

Study participants were 18 middle school science education PSTs enrolled in an engineering teaching methods course at the first author’s university between 2021 to 2023 and who consented to participate (86% participation rate). The discussion with Savannah was a course assignment and was their first engineering teaching experience. Prior to it, the PSTs engaged in brainstorming for the wind turbine design challenge as learners.

We employed qualitative content analysis of the 18 discussion transcripts, coding each PST turn in the discussions. We began with a prior codebook, which we iteratively refined as we applied codes. We found that all PSTs used prompts that likely supported (179 codes across transcripts) and likely hindered (142 codes) Savannah’s engagement in brainstorming. Supportive prompts included those that (1) referred to specific ideas about the nature and usefulness of engineering brainstorming, the most frequent being about the importance of having multiple brainstormed ideas (26% of codes); and (2) codes that encouraged Savannah to share about her first idea (15%), generate a second idea (33%), or refer to scientific findings (44%). Of the prompts that we coded as hindering Savannah’s engagement in brainstorming, 48% were about the PST evaluating Savannah’s first or second idea and 52% were about the PST making suggestions about the variables to use or specific design ideas for her second idea.

These findings suggest that PSTs likely come to engineering education learning experiences with ideas for productive prompts to support brainstorming. However, they need additional support to avoid using prompts that might hinder student engagement in the brainstorming process.