Design activities are increasingly used in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. Guiding students during these activities can be challenging for STEM teachers, who may be inexperienced in the field of design. In this study, we focused on a case of three chemistry teachers who implemented design projects in their classrooms. During the lessons, the students designed a self-heating or self-cooling cup, in which the energy effect of chemical reactions causes a heating or cooling effect on the cup’s contents. Through an in-depth analysis of the conversations between the teachers and student groups, we aim to understand how teachers verbally support students and any factors that may influence this. We used concepts from scaffolding theory to analyze the support. By organizing the data into segments based on these scaffolding concepts, we were able to characterize the different approaches taken by the teachers. The types of support varied; for example, the teacher might take control of the process or stimulate the students’ reasoning. The support appears to be adapted to the students, the lessons and the topics of the conversations. These are possible factors that may influence the way in which teachers support the students during design activities.@en

Design activities are gaining interest as rich contexts for learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. STEM teachers may find this challenging however, as designing requires support that they are not used to providing. In a subject like chemistry, teachers would have to balance creativity and responsibility for the students with concept learning and safety in the classroom. In a case study, we analyzed the verbal interactions of three teachers with their students during design activities in the classroom, with the aim of understanding what teachers and students talk about and how chemistry teachers support the students with their designs. During the lesson, students worked on the design of a self-heating or self-cooling cup, while also performing chemistry experiments to learn about the energy effects of reactions. Such a lesson reflects what design activities in the chemistry classroom could look like. We described the topics that teachers and students talk about, revealing that teachers support students through several types of feedback and questions. We also found that teachers support design tasks in a more open, constructive, and encouraging way than is used for experiments and chemistry concepts, which are supported in a closed, clarifying, and steering manner.@en

Design-based learning is considered a powerful way to help students apply and develop understanding of science concepts, but research has shown that the success of this approach is not a given. Examining students' understanding of science concepts in various design-based learning contexts has thus continued to be an important field of research. To help advance such work, we explored the affordances of a novel analytic approach for studying data gathered in design-based learning classrooms. We used the “chemical thinking framework,” specifically its “conceptual sophistication” dimension, to analyze 10th-grade, chemistry students' design talk and drawings. We gathered this data during small-group design planning and drawing activities in the classrooms of two teachers whose students were designing a product that harnesses chemical energy to change the temperature of a beverage or snack. The findings demonstrate that this analytic approach was able to reveal that students (implicitly) drew on their understanding of several chemistry concepts while designing. Moreover, it showed that students could use everyday as well as more sophisticated understandings regarding a given chemistry concept while designing. This study furthermore unveiled differences in what and how students' design talk and drawings may reveal use of conceptual understanding, and it showed that different student teams may use a unique combination of understandings during design planning and drawing. We describe how this study's analytic approach complements existing approaches in design-based learning research, and how our findings provide implications for research and practice.@en