‘Magic’ or ‘maybe … other years’: designing for young adolescents’ engagement and self-efficacy in an invention camp

ABSTRACT

Student engagement is a central concept for educational practitioners, researchers, and evaluators, especially working with learners historically minoritised in science developing their self-efficacy. Design-oriented projects in invention education show potential for promoting equitable engagement, partly by building upon learners’ sociocultural backgrounds and experiences. However, the relationship between more social and more individual conceptions of student engagement is not yet well understood. We took a cultural psychology approach to design-based research for planning, implementing, and analysing a five-day camp in the Northeast US, wherein grades 6–8 students invented an electronic door and a free-choice invention. Our mixed-methods case study for convergence revealed some statistically significant changes in engagement and self-efficacy for inventing, which qualitative analyses suggest were related to campers' cognitive self-efficacy for ability with technology, campers' perceived agency for inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to inventing, and the camp's social infrastructure for student participation. Further, we found evidence differentiating individual and social levels of affective/emotional, behavioural, and cognitive engagement, supporting a six-part model over previous three- and four-part models. We conclude with conjectures about the camp's enactment, learning processes, and outcomes, providing an educational model that could be useful in designing similar environments for user- or activity-centred design projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Student engagement
• affective domain
• design study
• K-12

Acknowledgements

Pablo Bendiksen performed the multilevel modelling. G. Michael Barnett gave consistent feedback during the writing process. S. Ahmad Shah participated in team coding of qualitative data. The Innovation in Urban Science Education (IUSE) lab at Boston College and participating campers, co-advisors, and counsellors, were all instrumental in the design-based approach to the ongoing research-practice partnership. In addition to the original curriculum, instructional support was provided by representatives of the Lemelson-MIT JV InvenTeams Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Unless otherwise noted, all program, participant, city, and school/district names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Boston College Collaborative Fellows Grant.