Papers by Marc J. de Vries
Australasian Journal of Technology Education
In 2020 an article about American experts’ opinions on the future of technology education was pub... more In 2020 an article about American experts’ opinions on the future of technology education was published. Several concerns were expressed by the experts in the Delphi study that had been conducted, such as a shortage of teachers and funding. From the start of the study in the USA, the idea was to conduct similar studies in other countries. It is interesting to see to what extent the outcomes are USA-specific or more broadly valid. To find that out a similar study was done in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) and the Netherlands. In our Delphi study, consent was found among the experts in three rounds. It became clear that there are similarities between the USA outcomes but also differences. Most of those differences can be explained by taking into account the local developments in the different countries.
The Aichi University of Education has been making a remarkable contribution to the development of... more The Aichi University of Education has been making a remarkable contribution to the development of industrial technology education for developing countries by many activities. In this background, there are advantages of being located in one of the most active industrial areas in Japan and the Technology Education Department is playing a positive role. The activities mentioned above are as follows. The training course of industrial technology education was implemented with the cooperation of JICA from 1999. The International cooperation symposiums were hosted by the university with the JICA training courses in 2003 and 2008. International Forum on “Making Things and Education” project was done at the World Exposition 2005 in Aichi. International Cooperative Initiative Project in the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has done with the theme of “Model Creation of Core Curriculum Sharing System to Support the Industrial Technology Education in Developing Coun...
Design and technology education : an international journal, 2020
During a Design and Technology class, engagement is both required to start creative hands-on work... more During a Design and Technology class, engagement is both required to start creative hands-on work and a sign of pupil's creative thinking. To find ways to achieve engagement, we can look to the Montessori tradition. Due to the fact that learning is regarded as feeding insight through experimenting, tasks have to offer pupils the opportunity to gain knowledge about isolated details of the learning situation. This is realised by brief, simple and objective tasks combined with liberty to approach the hands-on work in one's own way. Applied to Design and Technology, we can define brief, simple and objective tasks with a focus on a technique as an isolated detail of the learning situation. Offering liberty during hands-on work enables creative thinking. The deployment of well-defined tasks with a focus on a technique is possible by dividing a complex assignment into a collection of brief tasks with single problems and working towards single objectives in the topic, making use of a single technique. Such a collection is a format that has the potential to enable ongoing engagement. This case-study researches the actual effect of a stepwise organised collection of tasks on the design performance of pupils of nine to twelve years old. The results show that the tasks turned out to be useful in initiating engagement. In combination with joint presentations, ongoing engagement was achieved resulting in well-considered designs and products. In addition, dialogue with disengaged pupils delivered solutions towards engagement. As a side-effect of dialogue the teacher-pupil relationships and the pupil-pupil relationships improved.
International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2020
Design feedback is an essential pedagogical tool that can help young novice designers navigate di... more Design feedback is an essential pedagogical tool that can help young novice designers navigate divergent and convergent paths while designing. However, design feedback is often met with resistance, which counteracts its potential to help novice designers evaluate their design and generate new solution directions. In this paper, we report on the construction and utilization of a design feedback intervention during a real-life design project with a group of primary school children (aged 8–12). The goal of the intervention was to stimulate young novice designers’ creative thinking by guiding the design feedback dialogues with their peers and clients. The intervention was designed according to the following key principles: (1) guide towards a shared understanding of the design through low-level convergent feedback, (2) stimulate critical reflection and evaluation of the design to help identify and internalize possible shortcomings through high-level convergent feedback, and (3) provide ...
International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2020
Preliminary empirical research conducted by the leading author has shown that design students usi... more Preliminary empirical research conducted by the leading author has shown that design students using biological analogies, or models across different contexts, often misinterpreted these, intentionally or unintentionally, during design. By copying shape or form without integrating the main function of the mimicked biological model, students failed to consider the process or system directing that function when attempting to solve the design need. This article considers the first step in the development of an applicable educational model using distant analogies from nature, by means of biomimicry thinking methodology. The analysis examines results from a base-line exercise taken by students in the Minor Design with Nature during the Spring semester of Industrial Design Engineering at The Hague University of Applied Sciences in 2019, verifying that students without biomimicry training use this hollow approach automatically. This research confirms the gap between where students are at th...
Research in Science Education, 2018
Students in upper secondary education encounter difficulties in applying mathematics in physics. ... more Students in upper secondary education encounter difficulties in applying mathematics in physics. To improve our understanding of these difficulties, we examined symbol sense behavior of six grade 10 physics students solving algebraic physic problems. Our data confirmed that students did indeed struggle to apply algebra to physics, mainly because they lacked both sufficient symbol sense behavior and basic algebraic skills. They used ad hoc strategies instead of correct, systematic rule-based procedures involving insight. These ad hoc strategies included the cross-multiplication, the numbering, and the permutation strategy. They worked only for basic formulas containing few variables. In problems with more variables, students got stuck. The latter two strategies substitute numbers for variables. The permutation strategy randomly checks several permutations to guess which one is correct. The numbering strategy substitutes numbers to check algebraic manipulations. Our results indicate i...
Physics Education, 2019
Successfully carrying out a secondary school physics inquiry requires a considerable amount of pr... more Successfully carrying out a secondary school physics inquiry requires a considerable amount of procedural and content knowledge. It further requires knowledge of how and why maintaining scientific standards produces the best available answer to the given research question. To this purpose, a series of five inquiry activities was developed and tested in a single case study with students aged 14. The test shows that students indeed come to use a more scientific approach to inquiry tasks and understand why they should do so. We believe that this series of activities can serve as a starting point for more complex physics inquiries.
International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2019
In this paper, we explore the early indicators of design fixation occurring during the concept de... more In this paper, we explore the early indicators of design fixation occurring during the concept development stage of children’s design processes. This type of fixation, which we named:concept fixation, causes a blind adherence to the current (possibly unfavourable) state of a design idea. Its occurrence hampers the creative thinking processes present in a design process, which in turn stagnates the development of initial design ideas into final designs. Until now, research on design fixation has mainly focussed on creative idea generation in the early phases of the design process through analysing (intermediate) design ideas and completed artefacts. However, children’s fixation behaviours might be identified at an earlier moment through the conversations that take place in the classroom about their design ideas. To this end, we present a case study in which we explored early indicators of concept fixation of a group of 24 primary school children (ages 9–11) carrying out a co-design p...
Research in Science & Technological Education, 2017
Teaching strategies to promote concept learning by design challenges
Journal of Technology Education, 1991
Many contemporary students in educational research find that the course of their work will involv... more Many contemporary students in educational research find that the course of their work will involve objects of study that, rather than being inanimate, are usually human, and as such command a greater degree of respect. The Student's Guide to Research Ethics is a good practical guide for students dealing with the ethical issues that accompany this.
International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2005
The Design Way. Intentional change in an unpredictable world. Foundations and Fundamentals of Des... more The Design Way. Intentional change in an unpredictable world. Foundations and Fundamentals of Design Competence. Englewood Cliffs, Educational Technology Publications, 2003. ISBN 0-87778-305-5. 328 pages. Although there are quite a few books on design available for those who want to get to know this important field of activity, the book by Nelson and Stolterman offers something not available in many of its predecessors. It almost can be said to present a sort of 'philosophy of design,' whereas most of the other books tend to have a rather instrumental character and focus more on how to design than on the nature of the design process itself. The book contains several references to well known philosophers, together with many themes that feature in current philosophical debates on technology and design. This makes this volume, written with an audience of design educators and students particularly in mind, an interesting resource for reflecting on the nature of design. The Prelude opens the book with the statement that design is an activity that is fundamental to almost all human behavior. Whenever and wherever humans make an effort to change their environment according to their needs, this is what the authors call 'design.' They even talk about a 'culture of inquiry and action' as a new philosophical tradition that is defined and promoted by design; perhaps something of an overstatement. Larry Hickman, a contemporary philosopher of technology, in his book 'Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture' (2001) has convincingly shown that we find the origins of this philosophical tradition in the writings of John Dewey. Hickman himself also reckons his work belongs in this pragmatist tradition. In Part 1 of their book, Nelson and Stolterman call design the 'first tradition' among many traditions of inquiry and action developed over time. This too, may be a somewhat strong claim, as one can argue that imagining 'that-which-does-not-yet-exist' (a phrase used by the authors to indicate design) most probably is accompanied, and perhaps even proceeded by, observing 'that-which-is-already-at hand' (my own expression for the activity on which science is based). Nevertheless, the authors are totally correct in emphasizing the importance of design as part of our human being. Also, their remark that design also has to deal with unintended consequences and unpleasant surprises is both true and an often unmentioned characteristic of design. Here the authors make an interesting reference to the work of Horst Rittel who has shown that design problems have the nature of 'wicked' rather than 'tame' problems. Intention is mentioned by the authors as a basic human characteristic underlying design.
International Journal of Science Education, 2020
Bringing design practices to chemistry education is gaining interest with recent science curricul... more Bringing design practices to chemistry education is gaining interest with recent science curriculum reforms emphasising design, and calls for integrated STEM education. Design is a central practice in the chemistry discipline, and could foster meaningful chemistry education. Although chemistry teachers are key in bringing design to chemistry classrooms, and in realising design's potential for learning, little is known about their views on teaching and learning regarding design. To reduce this gap in literature, we explored chemistry teachers' pedagogical ideas in the context of a Dutch professional learning community on design in chemistry education. We elicited teachers' ideas through semi-structured interviews and lesson forms which teachers kept while implementing a design project. Multiple patterns emerged through analysing teachers' ideas. We found that the teachers did not see teaching design as a goal of chemistry education. Instead, teachers valued design as a teaching approach to engage students in applying chemistry concepts, in developing soft skills, and in applying or developing research practices. In this paper, we present more patterns in teachers' ideas, and discuss possible explanations of these findings in depth. Finally, we give suggestions for future research, and teacher professional development that may help support a change to bring design into chemistry education.
In internationaler Zusammenarbeit hat eine Forschergruppe ein Aufgaben-Entwicklungsmodell konzept... more In internationaler Zusammenarbeit hat eine Forschergruppe ein Aufgaben-Entwicklungsmodell konzeptualisiert, auf dessen Basis ein Testinstrument zur Erfassung der technischen Mündigkeit von Schüler/-innen zum Ende der Sekundarstufe I abgeleitet wurde. Mit diesem Testinstrument wurden 270 Schülerinnen und Schülern aus Deutschland, der Schweiz, Luxemburg, den Niederlanden und England getestet. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die technische Mündigkeit von Schüler/-innen im Alter von 13-16 Jahren nur mäßig ausgeprägt ist. Der durchschnittliche Anteil von 25 % der Aufgaben, die mit hoher Sicherheit falsch beantwortet wurden, lässt den Schluss zu, dass sich neben fehlendem Wissen auch eine relativ hohe Anzahl von Misskonzepten bei den Schüler/-innen verfestigt hat. Interessanterweise zeigen sich dabei keine großen Unterschiede in Bezug auf die einzelnen Länder und das Geschlecht. Schlüsselwörter: Technische Mündigkeit, Testinstrument, international
The present study aims to analyze the potential effects of teaching practice on learners' aut... more The present study aims to analyze the potential effects of teaching practice on learners' authentic communication in the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). To this purpose, we choose the theory of normative practices as one of the several theoretical frameworks proposed for examining educational practices including teaching practice. According to this theory, teaching as a normative practice involves structure and direction. The directions are derived from teachers' mentalities and worldviews and could evaluate and orient structure. In this study, we consider the authentic communication between teacher and students as the directional rule. In the first part, we analyze the changing community structure in the MOOCs based on the mentioned conceptual framework and in the next part we evaluate the directional rule of teaching practice, i.e. authentic communication. Finally, we analyze how changing the teaching structure in MOOCs could confront with this directional rule. The f...
Design and technology education : an international journal, 2017
In Dutch Design and Technology Education the beginning of a process of learning is usually determ... more In Dutch Design and Technology Education the beginning of a process of learning is usually determined by the teacher. In this paper it is argued that a beginning, determined in interaction with the students, is more profitable as the interaction will lead to joined-up exploring, creating and thinking and an increased motivation to learn. Furthermore, students are empowered to treat an activity as a means rather than an end. The interaction acts as groundwork in advance of the assignment. Groundwork is something that is done at an early stage and that makes later work or progress possible. Literature does however not cover the groundwork topic for children in the four-eight year age bracket. Therefore a model for the groundwork phase, consisting of five components, was designed and tested. The components are: context, communication, integration of acting and thinking, presentation of instruction and presentation of the problem. In this paper two case-studies, which handle groundwork ...
International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2020
EURASIA Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 2020
Mathematics is of major importance in science subjects. Unfortunately, students struggle with app... more Mathematics is of major importance in science subjects. Unfortunately, students struggle with applying mathematics in science subjects, especially physics. In this qualitative study we demonstrate that transfer of algebraic skills from mathematics in physics class can be improved by using pre-knowledge effectively. We designed shiftproblems involving instructional models to carry out small interventions in textbook problems. Shift-problems are feasible for teachers to adopt in teaching practice. To gain insight in the extent to which students improved their application of algebraic skills including basic skills and symbol sense behaviour, we selected three grade-10 physics students. In round one, the students solved algebraic physics problems as they appear in physics textbooks. Two weeks later in round two, the same problems were presented as shift problems to them where we activated prior mathematical knowledge by providing systematic rule-based algebraic hints at the start of these tasks. Algebraic skills were presented in a similar way to how these were learned in mathematics textbooks. We observed that students' problem-solving abilities increased from 48.5 % in the first to 81.8 % in the second round, indicating the effectiveness of how we implemented shift-problems. Furthermore, we discussed the implications of our results for the international science audience.
International Journal of Science Education, 2018
Senior pre-university education (SPE) students experience difficulties applying mathematics to ph... more Senior pre-university education (SPE) students experience difficulties applying mathematics to physics. This paper reports the outcome of an online explorative quantitative study of teachers' belief systems about improving transfer of algebraic skills from mathematics into physics, conducted among 503 mathematics and physics teachers working in SPE. We used a questionnaire with 16 beliefs about improving transfer, and asked teachers to select a top 5 and distribute 50 points among them. We used agglomerative hierarchical clustering to cluster qualified SPE teachers with more than 10 years of teaching experience. We found 3 large clusters, each containing naïve and desirable beliefs about transfer. These clusters turned out to be rather coherent sets of beliefs. Hence, these clusters can be interpreted as belief systems, to a certain extent justifying Ernest's [(1991). The philosophy of mathematics education. London: Falmer.] idea to cluster teachers based on their belief systems. We found relations between our groups and those of Ernest. Since naïve beliefs turn out to be weak in each cluster, science teacher educators can help science teachers to change their harmful naïve beliefs, into desirable transfer enhancing beliefs. Furthermore, we discuss some implications of our results for science teacher educators, curricula, teachers and textbooks.
Teaching about Technology, 2016
Uploads
Papers by Marc J. de Vries