Motivating children to learn: the role of technology education

Enhancing Engagement for All Pupils in Design & Technology Education. Structured Autonomy Activates Creativity, 2021

This thesis is searching for ways to engage all pupils in class in an ongoing way during primary Design & Technology lessons, so that all pupils are able to profit from the lessons. The aim of Design & Technology education is that pupils acquire knowledge, skills and attitudes related to technology as they encounter it in daily life and later in professions. Some of those skills can be instructed, but others need to be taught until understanding emerges, for instance designing. Designing is a way of thinking with many aspects. Creativity is one of them. Design can be seen as the imagination of ideas in reality. Thinking happens in one's mind and is invisible. That is why designing requires making decisions, so that the design can be expressed. Not only design requires making decisions, but also other Design & Technology activities do so. Deciding is an important subtask of designing, solving and making, which requires a lot of practice before it can be done in an informed way. Therefore, Design & Technology education must provide pupils with opportunities to practise decision making broadly. When pupils have learned how to make their own decisions, and they have the freedom to do so, every pupil can make their own decisions, anytime, anywhere. Design can have many functions. Design can be used to do research and construct knowledge, to think out solutions and make them, or to re-create reality to someone’s personal taste. In turn technology is an important means to experiment with the design in reality to fine-tune the knowledge or idea. Children go to school to prepare for their future lives. So personal development should be an important goal of learning. Then tasks are needed that focus on this. The exercise of deciding for themselves how to approach design and technology is useful for personal development. Design & Technology education can offer such exercises. In this way, children can discover that it is enjoyable to be able to decide for themselves. By being allowed to decide for themselves how they learn, pupils can make use of their strengths and work on their weaknesses. They can also discover that it is useful to be able to decide for themselves. Through the discoveries made during exercises in deciding for themselves, their personal development grows. The result, a well-matured personal development, will manifest itself in social behaviour, flexibility and creativity. Although Design & Technology activities have a huge potential, many teachers experience that children are not always engaged in these activities. That is a problem because without engagement, learning is impeded.

National Center For Engineering and Technology Education, 2009

The objective of this study was to evaluate grade 9-12 students' motivation while engaged in two different engineering design projects: marble-sorter and bridge designs. The motivation components measured in this study were focused on students' intrinsic (IGO) and extrinsic (EGO) goal orientations, task value (TV), self-efficacy for learning and performance (SELP), and control belief (CB). After finishing each project, students were asked to complete an Engineering Design Questionnaire (EDQ) survey instrument. The instrument consisted of 26 items modified from motivational scales of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ).Besides the motivational scales, five demographic and two open-ended questions exploring students' most and least motivating aspects about their designs were added to the instrument. From the statistical tests, the results showed a significant difference on students' IGO during marble-sorter and bridge design activities. Students' intrinsic goal orientation was significantly higher on bridge design than marble-sorter design. Students who planned to major in engineering or technology education were more significantly motivated working on the two design activities than those who whose majors were in other areas. Students' EGO did not appear to be correlated to their IGO, TV, SELP, and CB. Common themes associated with student motivation in the activities are presented in this report.

Design and Technology Education: an International Journal, 2020

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.

This paper considers some of the possibilities for supporting children's learning in design and technology with information technology in the primary school by looking at a range of published documents and the suggestions and advice which they outline. A report is made on the results of a small scale survey of practising teachers with responsibility for the coordination of design and technology in primary schools. It appears from the results of the survey that although there are many potentially important uses to which IT can be put, in the context of learning in design and technology, these have not been taken up by teachers to any great extent.

International Journal of Technology …, 2011

The purpose of this study was to determine the elements motivating comprehensive school students to study technology education. In addition, we tried to discover how students' motivation towards technology education developed over the period leading up to their school experience and the effect this might have on their future involvement with technology. The research was carried out as a qualitative case study and the material was collected through individual theme interviews. The study group consisted of four 15 to 16year-old students, each representing a totally different case of motivation towards technology education. In choosing individuals for the study the main criteria were gender and negative or positive motivation towards technology education. This study found that the artefact to be made in school and the student's freedom of choice had the most significant effect on motivation. Although, we must be careful with final conclusions as the research group was relatively small.

2018

Design-based learning (DBL) is attracting increasing attention for its potential to support informal learning, and as a way to enhance science and technology education at schools. However, related research has not yet considered the emotions children experience during DBL and how these affect the learning process. We report a case study aimed at developing a deeper understanding of children's emotional experience during DBL. In total 9 children (12-13 years old) are involved in this case study. In order to assess children's emotions during DBL lessons we used a self-reporting non-verbal instrument (the emotion card, which adapted from Five Degrees of Happiness Smiley Face Likert) and a verbal instrument (the Geneva Emotion Wheel Questionnaire, which contains 16 emotions). In addition, a group interview probed into the role of children's emotion during DBL. We discuss the methodological challenges exposed in this study, which will need to be addressed in future studies regarding the measurement of children's emotions in DBL.

2006

This paper describes a case study carried out to establish a group of low ability and disaffected pupils’ perception of the term “relevance” with particular reference to design and technology. Discussion of the relationship between pupils’ perceived relevance of an activity and their levels of engagement has appeared on the UK educational agenda, (Ofsted 2005:51-52, Davies et al, 2004:147, Daniels et al 1998:5.5, Denton, 1992), but not with the frequency which might be expected. Initial research suggested that pupils at this school had a very positive perception of the ‘relevance’ of design and technology. In contrast the literature reviewed suggested that pupils in their samples had a low perception of the ‘relevance‘ of design and technology. The findings suggest a dual understanding of “relevance”: in terms of present / situational and in terms of preparation for a particular purpose. The group of pupils in this research perceived ‘relevance’ more in terms of present / situationa...

Design and Technology Education an International Journal, 2008

This paper describes a case study carried out to establish a group of low ability and disaffected pupils' perception of the term 'relevance' with particular reference to design and technology. Discussion of the relationship between pupils' perceived relevance of an activity and their levels of engagement has appeared on the UK educational agenda, (Ofsted 2005, 51-52, Davies et al, 2004, 147, Daniels et al 1998, 5.5, Denton, 1992), but not with the frequency which might be expected. Initial research suggested that pupils at this school had a very positive perception of the 'relevance' of design and technology. In contrast the literature reviewed suggested that pupils in their samples had a low perception of the 'relevance' of design and technology. The findings suggest a dual understanding of 'relevance': in terms of present/situational and in terms of preparation for a particular purpose. The group of pupils in this research perceived 'relevance' more in terms of present/situational, and the implications of this finding for educational practitioners and other stakeholders is discussed.

Design and Technology Education an International Journal, 2008

Discussion of the relationship between pupils' perceived relevance of an activity and their levels of engagement has appeared on the UK educational

Can design education have a positive impact on primary school education beyond merely preparing designers? As designers, we know almost intuitively that design education is 'good education', and most designers would affirm that it would be beneficial to expose children to design education, because of the benefits of the signature pedagogies of design, such as problem-based learning, human centred creativity and iterations of prototyping and testing. This paper seeks to review and synthesize existing literature and make preliminary analyses, which will support the development of design thinking education interventions at primary school level, which could lead to a paradigm shift in education at this level. While it has been widely demonstrated that design education can play a successful role in supporting traditional education models in the delivery of skills such as math and language arts, this paper seeks to demonstrate that in addition to meeting traditional education demands, design thinking principles in children's education, such as empathy, collaboration and facilitation, human-centeredness, and creativity by iterations of prototyping and testing, will provide a sound base for children not only seeking to enter a design profession in the future but moving into any profession in the future and will lead to higher engagement at school and greater success in life.