Proceedings of the Second AAAS Technology Education Research Conference

Setting Priorities for Research in Technology Education

Daniel L. Householder, Compiler

Iowa State University

  

Research Topics Suggested in the Group Brainstorming Session

 

Conference participants identified a long list of research topics and questions during the final conference session. Unfortunately, participants were unable to group the topics and questions or to prioritize them during the time available in the conference schedule. The suggested topics and questions included:

 

• How people learn in the context of technology education.

• Political implications-firsthand discussions with officials who need evidence that technology education contributes to overall educational achievement.

• What do children learn?

• What is special about what they learn in technology classrooms?

• How can technology education provide opportunities for children in charter schools? What can be done for home-schooled students?

• Developmental studies of people at different ages.

• What are the preconceptions and misconceptions about design?

• What misconceptions put individuals at risk?

• What does the ideal assignment say about design?

• Help teachers design experiences.

• Methods to bridge from incorrect misconceptions toward correct conceptions.

• Moving from naïve ideas to sophisticated understanding.

• Conceptions (or misconceptions) among teachers and professionals in the field.

• How do teachers diagnose what is going on?

• Assess interactions between students and teachers.

• How do technological design projects transfer to scientific investigation?

• Are the decision-making tendencies of guidance counselors toward or away from technology education?

• How do students design and what do they learn?

• Procedures used by naïve designers.

• What do we have to start with and what are best practices to help students get where you want them to go?

• How do you help teachers learn those practices?

• What is the best way to get students involved in question-asking?

• How much hands-on experience is needed?

• How much does the teacher need to know about the technologies?

• How many alternatives does a group need to develop?

• Should portfolio development be an individual or group activity?

• What roles should the teacher play in technology?

• How can we facilitate lifelong learning in technology education?

• What is the role of design competitions?

• Develop taxonomy for teaching design.

• How do children develop ideas?

• How do you facilitate the learning of design competence?

• What design competence do learners have when they come to class?

• How effective are the various teaching strategies?

• How do private, social, and public interactions in the classroom affect the effectiveness of the pedagogy? How are the ideas expressed?

• How is student work, including the ability to identify and develop ideas, impacted upon by formal and informal education and performance in other areas?

• What influences pre-college students' selection of courses of study?

• How and why do different communities of students select different courses of study?

• Articulated learning and the need for an articulated curriculum in technology.

• How novices and experts do technological problem solving.

• Literacy and related factors.

• Role of new media in teaching.

• What is the relationship between technology education and the ways children learn?

• What is the relationship between technology education and economic effectiveness?

• Technological design and scientific inquiry.

• What resources are available for K-12? Are they appropriately organized for contemporary instruction?

• How people build notions of causality in complex systems, in doing design, simulation-related to device knowledge.

• Professional researchers investigating practitioners' beliefs about what children know in an area.

• Test technology educators' beliefs about why they do what they do and identify disparities between performance and expectations.

• Are both Mode 1 and Mode 2 research needed? (See the Barlex paper.)

• Is there-or should there be a middle way? How else did we get Post-It notes?

• Show teachers another option or a better way-identified by studying exemplary practices.

• How much experience is required to change inappropriate beliefs?

• Expert researcher-classroom practitioner teams.

• How to increase creativity.

• How to empower students.

• What educational benefits accrue from taking risks and challenging authority in design?

• How to do pre-service and in-service teacher education.

• How to identify best practices in design.

• Are art, design, architectural design and engineering design similar? How do the design processes differ?

• Case studies of contexts and how effective they are at different grade levels. Which contexts enrich technological activities?

• Readiness.

• Two-dimensional or three-dimensional representation-at what grade levels?

• What design and problem solving experiences are appropriate at what grade levels?

• What technical knowledge is required to be successful in design?

• Develop instrumentation and legitimate and effective assessment methodologies for assessing technological literacy.

• Comparisons of assessment strategies.

• Teacher education.

• What makes a good teacher education program?

• What are the attributes of a good technology teacher?

• What can we teach an aspiring teacher well without the teacher having classroom experience?

• What can we do during the induction experience, and what belongs in the in-service setting?

• How to capture student work in process at several stages; how to analyze the stages in the development of their thinking, designing, and making at each stage.

• How to decide whether an initial design should be standardized, whether a problem should be open-ended, or whether student approaches to the problem differ depending upon the initial formulation of the design challenge?

• Decision-making.

• Does an understanding of the nature of technology improve decision making?

• Student connections between technology and society.

• What technology education programs are needed for individuals with special needs?

• What technology education programs are needed for developing countries?

• What technology education programs are needed to foster economic development?

• How can teachers be convinced to do technology education?

• How do teachers use technology as a vehicle for accomplishing broader educational purposes?

• What do students think that they are doing when they are doing technology?

• What is the affective component-the heart and soul of technology education?

• Why is the craft tradition so resilient?

• How can a similar affective commitment be built in technology?

• How to make technology meaningful in the lives of learners?

• Investigate affective outcomes in the light of current understanding of how people learn.

• To what extent does technology motivate learners? How does it affect self-esteem?

• Deal with the confusion between technology education and instructional technology. (Mode 2)

• Integrate research on pedagogy with outcomes assessment and teacher education.

• Without knowing how children think about technology, it is difficult to assess affective dimensions.

• Building the knowledge base about learning and teaching and teacher education in the light of what we know about how people learn.

• What do we want students to learn?

• What do we know about how they presently learn it?

• Teacher education research should be based upon and connected with the knowledge base on learning and teaching.

• Professional development for teachers: how well do current programs work?

• Is the "WestEd" model for science and mathematics teacher professional development applicable in technology education? (Loucks-Horsely, S., Hewson, P. S., Love, N., & Stiles, K. E. [1998]. Designing professional development for teachers of science and mathematics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.)

• What are the goals and outcomes achieved by classroom instruction?

• What are the typical understandings developed in response to the instruction?

• What faculty development is needed?

• What methods could be used to achieve it?

• What gender differences occur in technology learning?

• Understand differential experiences of different groups in inclusive groupings.

• Outcomes need to be differentiated for different groups?

• Overall effects of educational treatments should be assessed first.

• What prerequisite competencies are needed?

• What are the effects of learning styles?

• What are the effects of teaching styles?

• What are the effects of testing approaches?

• How can teachers best deal with diversity?

Summary of Categories of Research Needed in Technology Education

 

Gary Benenson

City College

 

• Outcomes of technology education
• Methods of finding out what students have learned
• Assessment and evaluation of best practices
• Children's conceptions of technology
• Teacher education methodologies and outcomes
• Methodologies