Fostering Students' Design Outcome Effectiveness

Research illustrates that improving students’ ability to solve ill-structured, open-ended design problems only happens through a well-planned, structured, and scaffolded instructional process with engaging hands-on, minds-on student learning experiences. Scaffolding engineering design experiences enables both the students and teacher to become steadily more comfortable with design complexity, multiplex design processes, and challenging problems.

Design is a challenging complex task that requires both thinking and hands-on skills and abilities. The thinking involved during the design process is often related to broad terms that encompass a larger number of underlying skills and abilities. Such terms as systems thinking, problem scoping, modeling, experimenting, reflecting, and evaluating are just some of the skills that are implemented during the design process. These skills need to be embedded but also explicitly emphasized for students during design experiences. Technology and engineering educators will need to explicitly focus on the development of cognitive and metacognitive abilities to help students manage the complexity of design experiences.

There is evidence that teachers can develop students’ cognitive and metacognitive skills during design experiences using the SCOPE process. SCOPE is an acronym for Study, Criteria, Organize, Predict, and Evaluate. The SCOPE process is designed to help students slow down and thoroughly think through the design experience by studying the design situation, identifying the problem, identifying constraints and requirements, gathering and organizing information, making predictions based on design decisions, and evaluating and selecting the best approach based on information analysis.

Technology and engineering educators will need to explicitly focus on the development of cognitive and metacognitive abilities to help students manage the complexity of design experiences. SCOPE is an acronym for Study, Criteria, Organize, Predict, and Evaluate. The SCOPE process is designed to help students slow down and thoroughly think through the design experience by studying the design situation, identifying the problem, identifying constraints and requirements, gathering and organizing information, making predictions based on design decisions, and evaluating and selecting the best approach based on information analysis.

Points to Remember:

The SCOPE process is designed to promote students’ success throughout any design experience. Additionally, the SCOPE process should be continuously revisited throughout iterative design experiences. The SCOPE process helps to develop students’ cognitive and metacognitive abilities by connecting their thinking with their actions during design experiences. The SCOPE process can be used in conjunction with any design process the teacher decides to use and does not replace the design process.

When using the SCOPE process, a student will begin by studying the problem, which is the first part of any design experience. The “How” column suggests how the student will go about each stage of the SCOPE process. The How column suggests many items at each stage, but these suggestions are not all-encompassing of what happens at each stage of the SCOPE process.

Interested in more about helping students' design abilities to progress? Read "SCOPE Process: Fostering Students' Design Outcome Effectiveness" by Andrew J. Hughes and Cameron D. Denson in the September 2021 issue of Technology and Engineering Teacher.