Assessing Early Engineering Thinking and Design Competencies in the Classroom

Abstract

Young children are capable of understanding ideas that educators had once thought to be too complex for these ages. Children start to engage in creative design and develop engineering thinking at early ages as they play, create, solve puzzles, and ask questions. Just as it is important to highlight these activities as early engineering practices , it is important to use assessment practices necessary to support further development of engineering thinking . In this chapter, we lay the foundation for assessment of young children’s engineering thinking through discussion of current research on early engineering thinking  and effective approaches to assessment as we outline engineering design competencies for young learners. We also present the Mosaic framework , a model that guides assessment practices in engineering and provides practical strategies that are necessary to maintain complexity while teaching and assessing engineering design to young children. We urge the community toward a multi-faceted view of assessment that targets student learning evidence and growth supported by curriculum design, and teacher professional development , along with assessment tools and strategies.