Background A key feature of engineering design is collaborative, deliberate decision making that takes into account information about design options. K-12 students need opportunities for this kind of decision making if they are to meet the learning standards for engineering set out in the Next Generation Science Standards.Purpose This qualitative study sought to propose and operationalize a definition of reflective decision-making among elementary students. We investigated how urban elementary students enact reflective decision-making in a formal engineering design curriculum. MethodWe used naturalistic inquiry methodology and video recorded seven Engineering is Elementary design challenges in four classrooms. Students worked in small teams, and we focused on their planning and redesign phases. Maximum variation sampling, constant comparative analysis, and microethnographic accounts demonstrated the diversity of resources students utilized in their decision making. ResultsIn student discourse, we found evidence for six reflective decision-making elements: articulating multiple solutions, evaluating pros and cons, intentionally selecting a solution, retelling the performance of a solution, analyzing a solution according to evidence, and purposefully choosing improvements. The discourse patterns used to enact these elements both supported and interfered with students' achievement of design goals.Conclusions Our results suggest that during engineering design tasks, young learners working in small teams can respond productively to opportunities to engage in sophisticated discourse. However, further work is needed on tools and strategies that support reflective decision-making by all students during engineering design in elementary school.

Engineering design learning experiences are increasingly offered as part of elementary school, but research on how to support young learners' knowledge construction during classroom engineering is still preliminary. Questions remain about how classroom supports can make engineering thinking visible so that students build engineering knowledge along with engineering products. We report results from a case study of an 11-day teaching experiment in two elementary classrooms. With the classroom teachers, we guided fourth and fifth graders to document their design iterations with a digital notebooking tool, participate in whole-class design talks, and create and exhibit posters with "stomp rocket" design recommendations. We conducted a microethnographic analysis of students' interactions with these notebooking, talk, and poster tools. Our findings characterize how students constructed engineering design knowledge through the discourse of sense-making about rocket phenomena, decision-making for specific rocket iterations, and representation-making for external audiences. These results have implications for elementary engineering instruction: it appears productive for learning to structure whole-class design talks around representations of sequences of prototypes over time, rather than focusing only on current or best physical prototypes, and to structure engineering curriculum units so that they culminate with student-generated sets of design recommendations, rather than single design solutions. Science Education. 2019;103:952-978. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sce 952 |

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This article explores the talk among novice teachers who participated in an inquiry project designed to rethink the instruction for their struggling students by drawing upon competence rather than deficiencies. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) based on theories of systemic functional linguistics and CDA provided tools to explore how their use of language afforded or constrained their efforts to better serve diverse learners in their urban elementary classrooms. The analysis indicates the power of normative and deficit discourses that continue to predominate within educational culture. It reflects on this analysis and discusses potential benefits of centralising language awareness and a social/critical lens to ongoing professional development.