2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Out-of-school time (OST) offers many opportunities for youth to learn engineering; youth in OST engineering programs engage in engineering practices, increase their disciplinary knowledge, strengthen their identities as engineering learners, and build interest in engineering careers. OST educators contribute to these positive outcomes for youth through a variety of teaching practices. One way that educators influence youths’ learning is through ambitious instruction that elicits and supports youths’ engineering reasoning and engineering identity. This study focuses on ambitious engineering instruction at the level of educators’ moment-to-moment dialogue with small groups of learners.

While it is known that schoolteachers’ pedagogical talk moves influence learners, little is known about out-of-school time educators’ talk moves. This study examines the pedagogical talk moves of experienced out-of-school time educators during engineering design activities in OST programs for youth aged 8-12 years. The study identifies the talk moves of OST educators, adds to the understanding of pedagogical talk moves, and considers these talk moves within the framework of Ambitious Engineering Instruction. This study asks: What kinds of pedagogical talk moves do experienced OST educators use when interacting with youth during engineering design activities?
   
In this study, educators facilitated a series of engineering design challenges for a total of six to twelve hours in afterschool programs (one hour/week) or out-of-school workshops or mini-camps (two to four hours/day across two or three days). All educators taught at least five of six possible design challenges. We selectively sampled and analyzed the video- and audio-recordings of two educators teaching two of the same design challenges. We used the Ambitious Engineering Instruction Framework to classify the teaching talk moves that these educators used in interactions with individual youth and small groups of youth who were participating in these engineering design challenges.

We identified ambitious, inclusive, and conservative talk moves across the four samples. We observed educators seeking to understand youths’ design ideas, eliciting youths’ engineering reasoning, and encouraging youths to persist despite frustration with a design failure. These teaching moves have the potential to guide students to engage in productive engineering design practices and to support youths’ identities as capable engineering learners and possible future engineers. This analysis of educators’ teaching talk moves contributes to our understanding of ambitious engineering instruction in out-of-school learning environments.