ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the theory and research methods leading to decisions made while using a large video archive to investigate students and teachers socially constructing the phenomena of failure and improvement in elementary engineering design projects. Engineering curricula are being developed to respond to the recent educational reforms, but the lack in understanding of how students engineer and the support teachers need have led to a wide range of curricula with varying quality. The theoretical framework that guides this work is sociocultural. It is informed by “engineering studies,” the empirical study of engineering practice across settings, it considers the materials used in the engineering design process to be contributors to the interactions that should be considered. The curricular units comprising the full corpus of data included projects in electrical, package, landscape, environmental engineering. Half of the teachers in the archive taught a civil engineering unit prior to teaching one of these units in order to test for a dosage effect.
