Education Commons^™

Supporting Mechanistic Reasoning In Domain-Specific Contexts, Paul J. Weinberg

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

Mechanistic reasoning is an epistemic practice central within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. Although there has been some work on mechanistic reasoning in the research literature and standards documents, much of this work targets domain-general characterizations of mechanistic reasoning; this study provides domain-specific illustrations of mechanistic reasoning. The data in this study comes from the Assessment of Mechanistic Reasoning Project (AMRP) (Weinberg, 2012), designed using item response theory modeling to diagnose individuals’ mechanistic reasoning about systems of levers. Such a characterization of mechanistic reasoning illuminates what is easy and difficult about this form of reasoning, within the subdomain of …

Educational Standards, Teacher Preparation, And Metacognition Instruction For Elementary Students: Studies In Pre-College Engineering Education, Ronald Lee Carr

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is a compilation of three separate works representing a wide range of issues related to pre-college engineering. Each work addresses multiple levels of concern for educators from national policy to specific classroom intervention. Although presenting different styles of writing - due to different journals requirements - and various methods of research, all purpose to further research and instruction in pre-college engineering.

The research detailed in these papers has been inspired by the current STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education movement and in particular, by the National Academy of Engineering's leadership in promoting the integration of engineering into …