Summer/Fall2000 new order

Introduction In two studies we conducted, untutored Grade 7 students produced solutions to a design-and-make task in ways significantly different than ones prescribed by many textbooks and theories about learning to design. We found that novice designers (a) sequence the subprocesses of designing quite differently than the prescribed models, (b) do not generate several possible solutions and choose the most effective, (c) make greater use of three-dimensional modeling, (d) use less two-dimensional modeling than suggested by textbooks, and (e) constantly evaluate their design proposal from the earliest moments of the design-and-make process. The first study addressed the question: What design processes do Grade 7 students who have received no prior instruction use to produce a solution to a design-and-make task? Since the strategies used by these students may have been a function of the particular task and the way it was presented, a follow-up study addressed the question: Is the design process used by novices dependent on the task? This second study provided an opportunity to further investigate protocol analysis as a method for understanding novice designers’ strategies. It also resulted in the refinement of a coding scheme to describe design process skills. This article first describes the theoretical framework used for the two studies and reviews related literature. Next, the methods used to collect and analyze the data are described. This is followed by a discussion of the strategies used by students and how the strategies differ from those in theoretical models of the design process. The implications of these findings for the teaching of design and technology complete the article. The Centrality of Designing Much current school work presents tasks to students in a form that assumes there is only one correct way to do it and often only one correct solution. Design and technology education, however, presents tasks that have many possible solutions. Furthermore, it provides students with opportunities to apply knowledge to generate and construct meaning. It fosters the kind of cognition that combines declarative knowledge, the what, with procedural knowledge, the how. As Kimbell, Stables, Wheeler, Wosniak, and Kelly (1991) pointed out, “there [is] general agreement on certain basic tenets of [technology education]. It is an active study, involving the purposeful pursuit of a task to some form of resolution that results in improvement (for someone) in the made world” (p. 17). And as Breckon (1995) reiterated, “technology [education] provides that excellent method of learning—learning through doing” (p. 11). The “doing” in technology education involves using design process skills to design and make an artifact in response to a need. A typical form of design process includes identifying needs and opportunities, understanding and detailing a problem, generating possible solutions, building a solution, and evaluating a solution. This process shares many properties with a general problemsolving model used in the resolution of ill-structured problems (Simon, 1973). According to Jones (1970), “all [models of the design process] are attempts to make public the hitherto private thinking of designers, to externalize the design process” (p. 3). This is nearly always accomplished by using a diagram to show the steps in the process and the T h e J o u rn a l o f T e c h n o lo g y S tu d ie s