Beyond Problems on a Platter: Creating Tools for Teaching Planning in Real World Design

Rees Lewis, Daniel George

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-tfwv-3x45

Work

Beyond Problems on a Platter: Creating Tools for Teaching Planning in Real World Design

Public

Download PDF

Download All Files (.zip)

Design problems are highly ill-structured, having “ambiguous specifications of goals, no determined solution path, and the need to integrate multiple knowledge domains” (Jonassen, 2000, p. 80). Design problems are generated by stakeholders to meet needs that exist outside of the classroom (Simon, 1973; Jonassen, 2000)—this is in contrast to most problems seen in K-12 project- and problem-based learning which are generated by teachers and students. Highly ill- structured design problems raise challenges for standard pedagogical approaches (Jonassen & Hung, 2015), such as constraining design instructors ability to predict and plan what the teams should do throughout the course, or creating solution specific scaffolds because instructors don’t know what the solution to the problem. The goal of this dissertation is to understand how technology and curriculum can better support students in learning to tackle design problems. In study 1 of this dissertation, I investigate what design instructors experience as their most pressing challenges in teaching by interviewing 47 design instructors at institutes of higher education across the US. I identify 7 challenges and discuss how they can inform how we create learning environments for design education; in particular, the following two design instructor challenges inform my design-based research approach in study 2 and study 3: (a) monitoring and providing assistance to teams to help them manage themselves, and (b) coordinating the other co-educators, such as volunteer professionals who act as design-coaches and so also need to monitor teams and provide assistance. Study 2 examines the challenge of supporting volunteer design-coaches to monitor and provide assistance to student design teams online. By helping design-coaches to monitor and provide assistance to teams online, the goal was also to also reduce how much coordination design instructors had to do to encourage volunteer coaches to continue to coach. Employing a design- based research approach, I developed software and related practices called StandUp to both (a) support student teams’ planning, and (b) connect student design teams with professional designers who volunteered to coach teams. Through analysis of field notes, interview data, and log data, I found that StandUp increased online coach-student interactions and online coaching in comparison to the preliminary study the previous year. Study 3 examines the challenge of helping students to manage themselves and increase their chances of building something stakeholders value. My approach in study 3 is to support student teams to plan their short-term development and testing goals. Employing a design-based research approach, I developed Planning-to-Iterate, a facilitated instructor-lead workshop designed to support student design teams to enact their own iterative practices. Planning-to-Iterate uses the design canvas and iteration plan templates, which helped teams surface what to test and then plan how to test. Through analysis of field notes, video recordings, audio recordings, and student artifacts, I found that in comparison to the preliminary study the previous year, Planning-to- Iterate increased teams: (a) cascaded iterations, which measure frequency of building solutions, testing solutions, and gathering other information relevant to the design; (b) coupled iterations, which describes testing that informs problem understanding, solutions understanding, and solution re-design; and (c) conclusions with evidence teams’ drew about the if their solutions could address an important problem. This work presents a needs analysis of design instructors, and two empirically grounded design models for addressing challenges in design education. In doing so, this work advanced design education by outlining design principles for creating adoptable interventions that support learning in design. Study 1 shows that in comparison to traditional forms of teaching, design instructors experience serious challenges in either coaching teams to engage in expert iterative practices, or orchestrating additional educators who coach teams. Study 2 shows that socially- shared regulation technology (SSRL) can simultaneously support student teamwork, while also increasing how much online coaching a professional designer contributes. Importantly, online coaching occurred with the design instructor spending minimal time facilitating the use of the SSRL technology after the initial introduction. Study 3 shows that student design teams can be encouraged to conduct more iteration by when facilitated in their use of the design canvas and iteration plan templates for (a) defining design problem and solution elements, (b) identifying project risks, and (c) making risk reducing the goal of testing. In sum, this work advances our ability to support students to design solutions to real world problems. This means we are better able to prepare students to work on pressing societal problems, such as climate change, homelessness, and educational equity.

Creator