This thesis is searching for ways to engage all pupils in class in an ongoing way during primary Design & Technology lessons, so that all pupils are able to profit from the lessons. The aim of Design & Technology education is that pupils acquire knowledge, skills and attitudes related to technology as they encounter it in daily life and later in professions. Some of those skills can be instructed, but others need to be taught until understanding emerges, for instance designing. Designing is a way of thinking with many aspects. Creativity is one of them. Design can be seen as the imagination of ideas in reality. Thinking happens in one's mind and is invisible. That is why designing requires making decisions, so that the design can be expressed. Not only design requires making decisions, but also other Design & Technology activities do so. Deciding is an important subtask of designing, solving and making, which requires a lot of practice before it can be done in an informed way. Therefore, Design & Technology education must provide pupils with opportunities to practise decision making broadly. When pupils have learned how to make their own decisions, and they have the freedom to do so, every pupil can make their own decisions, anytime, anywhere. Design can have many functions. Design can be used to do research and construct knowledge, to think out solutions and make them, or to re-create reality to someone’s personal taste. In turn technology is an important means to experiment with the design in reality to fine-tune the knowledge or idea. Children go to school to prepare for their future lives. So personal development should be an important goal of learning. Then tasks are needed that focus on this. The exercise of deciding for themselves how to approach design and technology is useful for personal development. Design & Technology education can offer such exercises. In this way, children can discover that it is enjoyable to be able to decide for themselves. By being allowed to decide for themselves how they learn, pupils can make use of their strengths and work on their weaknesses. They can also discover that it is useful to be able to decide for themselves. Through the discoveries made during exercises in deciding for themselves, their personal development grows. The result, a well-matured personal development, will manifest itself in social behaviour, flexibility and creativity. Although Design & Technology activities have a huge potential, many teachers experience that children are not always engaged in these activities. That is a problem because without engagement, learning is impeded. @en

During a Design and Technology class, engagement is both required to start creative hands-on work and a sign of pupil’s creative thinking. To find ways to achieve engagement, we can look to the Montessori tradition. Due to the fact that learning is regarded as feeding insight through experimenting, tasks have to offer pupils the opportunity to gain knowledge about isolated details of the learning situation. This is realised by brief, simple and objective tasks combined with liberty to approach the hands-on work in one’s own way. Applied to Design and Technology, we can define brief, simple and objective tasks with a focus on a technique as an isolated detail of the learning situation. Offering liberty during hands-on work enables creative thinking. The deployment of well-defined tasks with a focus on a technique is possible by dividing a complex assignment into a collection of brief tasks with single problems and working towards single objectives in the topic, making use of a single technique. Such a collection is a format that has the potential to enable ongoing engagement. This case-study researches the actual effect of a stepwise organised collection of tasks on the design performance of pupils of nine to twelve years old. The results show that the tasks turned out to be useful in initiating engagement. In combination with joint presentations, ongoing engagement was achieved resulting in well-considered designs and products. In addition, dialogue with disengaged pupils delivered solutions towards engagement. As a side-effect of dialogue the teacher-pupil relationships and the pupil-pupil relationships improved.@en

In this paper, pupils’ design behaviour is regarded as an expression of active knowledge acquisition. Four cases of building a task structure, which supports effective discovery learning, were investigated. We focus on simple characteristics in a model to explain the effects of the structure on task execution. It reconciles the advantages of direct instruction and constructionism. The model offers an easy way to immediately denote pupils’ behaviour during the lesson. The idea is that the model can function as a heuristic and becomes manageable for use by the teacher during the lesson. In this way it strongly serves formative evaluation. In the first case we observed the following characteristics of the task underpinning attentive and active design behaviour: Success criteria, formulated during task instruction, guided performance and evaluation. The task was both challenging and doable. A joint evaluation of performance results and methods that concluded the task led to shared knowledge and language. In the second case, we researched the effect of enhancing skilfulness of focused observation on the quality of discovery and subsequent invention. In the third case, we observed that a familiar situation benefitted the start of the performance. However, the absence of a joint evaluation led to limited shared knowledge and shared language regarding the task. This hindered pupil’s rise of clear expectations about the expected results. In the last case, we researched the effect of enhancing skilfulness of analysis on the quality of verbal expression of discovery and subsequent invention. The thinking hats of De Bono were used as instruments to express ideas about a cuddly toy. The four cases together resulted in a simple model based on task characteristics that furthers active discovery and invention. @en

Maker education uses the concept of learning through interaction of the hand and the mind and is therefore a good instrument for Design and Technology education. However it appears to be difficult to engage all pupils in a class. Still, it is in all pupils’ interest that all pupils are enabled to engage, because only then a strong community of makers can emerge. Engagement can be hindered by the absence of abilities, needed to accomplish a task. When this leads to passiveness or frustration, it may disturb the group process of collaboration. In earlier research we found out that adjusting simple challenges to pupils’ abilities and adding clear success criteria to create a manageable ‘cognitive conflict’ is a way to border a task. Within these borders there is room for freedom. This freedom can result in ongoing discovery behaviour. A joint evaluation of the various results of the task will lead to joint development of knowledge, leading to a next level of familiarity. This joint knowledge together with the by discovery behaviour expanded abilities, outlines the base of a next task. When for some pupils the devised borders fail, diagnosis of the failing border will be simple; is it a failing adjustment to pupil’s abilities, or is it a too complex challenge, or is it a vague success criterium or is it a failing joint evaluation? After diagnosis offering proper support is easy. In this study we researched the actual effect of a series of clear bordered tasks on the discovery behaviour of the pupils. In the tradition of lesson-study we focused on if and how this approach was useful to get disruptive pupils active in discovery through making. The results showed that the tasks turned out to be useful in changing the observed pupils’ behaviour towards active making and discovery. As a result of the improved discovery behaviour the teacher-pupil relationships and the pupil-pupil relationships improved as well.@en

One of the core activities of Design and Technology Education is designing, which is a thinking activity that benefits greatly from expression. Verbal expression serves interaction. A teacher can induce verbal expression in pupils by inviting them to interact about familiar subjects. This interaction is a stepping stone towards an integration of exploring, creating and thinking, resulting in broad thinking, and to sharing ideas. In order to establish interaction, ideas need to be verbalised into informative expressions that are recognisable as such by the whole class. Teachers can influence the quality of interaction by teaching the rules and means of verbal expression. This teaching needs the golden mean of non-authoritative guidance, oriented towards discovery of the rules and means, and a carefully prepared environment leading to insight in the concept of verbalisation. This kind of teaching will make pupil's feelings change from curious into smart and competent with regard to verbalisation. The case study focused on enabling pupils to verbally express the features of a cuddly toy. The age of the pupils was of four to six years old and the thinking hats of De Bono were used as a structuring instrument to initiate the activity. The results show that through this approach the teacher succeeded in teaching the rules and means of verbal expression, without hampering the expressiveness and autonomy of the pupils. As a result class and teacher together managed to create a starting point for further procedural growth about “how to express yourselfâ€. They also set a structure in which other subjects could be discussed in future.@en

In Dutch Design and Technology Education the beginning of a process of learning is usually determined by the teacher. In this paper it is argued that a beginning, determined in interaction with the students, is more profitable as the interaction will lead to joined-up exploring, creating and thinking and an increased motivation to learn. Furthermore, students are empowered to treat an activity as a means rather than an end. The interaction acts as groundwork in advance of the assignment. Groundwork is something that is done at an early stage and that makes later work or progress possible. Literature does however not cover the groundwork topic for children in the four-eight year age bracket. Therefore a model for the groundwork phase, consisting of five components, was designed and tested. The components are: context, communication, integration of acting and thinking, presentation of instruction and presentation of the problem. In this paper two case-studies, which handle groundwork in different ways, are described. The groundwork was in both cases addressed in group activities, aiming to prepare students to commence a process of learning. The cases show that, when used in combination, the five components appear to make groundwork successful. Careful communication gave added value. A communication link was configured between teacher and learner, between learners, and between subject and learner. Through groundwork the teacher shared both thoughts and knowledge with the students and this created a base for effective classroom communication and a common approach.@en