Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 654 de 957
Participants
Table 1: Research phases
Participants were elementary pupils in grades two through four (ages 8-11) from one
school district in the south-central United States taking part in the study during Spring
2009 (Cohort 1 students), Spring 2010 (Cohort 2 students), and Fall 2010 (Cohort 3
students). The participant demographic was ethnically diverse, with pupils from both
urban and suburban schools. There were 19 participating classrooms; ten were
classrooms incorporating engineering curriculum elements (treatment) and nine were
control (comparison) classrooms. The interviews that were analyzed were an equal
number of both treatment and control schools (Cohort 1), and triangulation took place
with both treatment and control groups (Cohorts 2 and 3).
DAET Assessment and Coding System
During assessment administration, each participant received the DAET form and a writing
utensil and was told, “In the box on your piece of paper, draw an engineer doing engineering
work,” and was allowed to draw for 20 minutes. Within that time, each pupil also
answered the question, “What is the engineer doing?” Both the drawing and written
answers to the question were included in the coding of the drawings. Following the
drawing exercise, pupils were randomly selected to participate in an interview to explain
their drawing and discuss their thoughts about and engineers engineering.
The DAET Coding System was developed over a series of six iterations using a grounded
theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). In initial iterations, open coding of pupils’
drawings, written answers, and interview transcripts were used to develop initial
categories. Next, axial coding was used to condense and refine the codes (Weber et al.,
2010) while incorporating findings and recommendations from previously published
research (e.g., Fralick, et al., 2008; Knight & Cunningham, 2004; Oware, 2008; Prabha &
Garg, 2000; Weber, 2008).
Pupil Interview Analysis
As part of a larger research project, an interview protocol was developed to accompany
the DAET. This protocol was intended to gather in-depth data about pupil perceptions of
engineering. The first section of the protocol asked about the drawing in general; the
second section focused on questions to better understand pupil perceptions of engineers
and engineering. New sets of questions were added to the existing pupil interview
protocol to target different categories of the DAET coding system; these additional
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011