Engineering Commons^™

Reading And Engineering: Elementary Students’ Co-Application Of Comprehension Strategies And Engineering Design Processes, Amy Wilson-Lopez, Stacie Gregory, Victor Larsen

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

For decades, researchers have asserted that K–12 teachers should embed reading comprehension instruction within each academic discipline, including ‘‘technical subjects’’ such as engineering. Recently, this assertion has become a source of controversy among researchers and practitioners who believe that time spent on teaching reading comprehension strategies may detract from time spent on more authentic activities such as engineering design. The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate whether and how elementary students’ applications of comprehension strategies overlapped with their application of engineering design processes. The authors provided comprehension strategy instruction to 57 third- and fifth-grade students as they read …